[MacRuby-devel] book idea - "making it look like Ruby"

Rich Morin rdm at cfcl.com
Sat Feb 12 17:45:17 PST 2011


Robert Payne <robertpayne at me.com> wrote:
> Is it extremely bad practice to use Camel Case in Ruby?
> At least for MacRuby?  I have been mostly because I'm
> an Objective-C developer and it's what I'm used to as
> well as all of the Apple API are Camel Case and I didn't
> want to make the code spaghetti between the two.

Matt Aimonetti wrote:
> It is not, we are just talking about conventions here.
> Personally I like to use both casing approaches so I
> can see the difference between obj-c APIs and Ruby's.

Indeed, it's "just" a matter of tastes and conventions.
Some folks like CamelCase.  I despise so much that, when
forced to use upper case (eg, to name a class), I tend
to use a Combination_Method, for readability.


IMHO, two of the nicest things about Ruby are:

  *  Matz's taste as a language designer

  *  TIMTOWTDI, inherited from Perl

I'm extremely OCD about how my code looks.  I polish it
until it's as clean and readable as I can make it.  By
giving me a nice starting point and not getting in my
way, Ruby allows me to write code I can be proud of.

If a Ruby variant (eg, MacRuby) forces my code to look
like a combination of Ruby with Java, ObjC, or another
high-ceremony language, that will diminish my joy (and
perhaps my efficiency) in using it.


At 4:41 PM -0800 2/12/11, Matt Aimonetti wrote:
> Ok so I will play the mean team member and tell you
> that we are seriously not considering supporting
> something like that as part of the base implementation.
> Now that doesn't mean that you guys can't create a gem
> to support that.

The next step, as I posted earlier, is to transliterate
an example, then look over the results.  So, there is
only one situation where a change to MacRuby needs to be
considered at all:

  MacRuby.hack if code.nicer? and code.slow?

When and if that happens, we can talk about sanitary ways
to hack variant behavior into MacRuby's code base, etc.

-r
-- 
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm            Rich Morin
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume     rdm at cfcl.com
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog     +1 650-873-7841

Software system design, development, and documentation


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