Good article raganwald.<p>I'm just learning RoR and I guess my biggest hangup is the prodigious use of colons.<p>I admire your ability to "rewrite code for Ruby"...<p>For me it's tough enough to learn one language. There is no way that I would ever attempt anything but a greenfield application with RoR and to finish that I will probably need some help. What attracted me to the language was the impression I got from reviewing descriptive materials from DHH and the 37 signals crew that Ruby has a great deal of elegance when it comes to interacting with databases. And, for me anyways, that's the only kind of elegance I'm really interested in because I think that's where the money is going to be. So far I'm not really good enough with the syntax to say whether it's going to live up to expectations but I haven't really seen anything yet that would cause me to say I've made a mistake in choosing this platform.
Blocks may not be able to genuinely accept blocks in Ruby, but I was able to get something pretty close: <a href="http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/293232" rel="nofollow">http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...</a>
<i>To my eyes, Ruby as a language looked a lot like an internal IT app that is built as an aggregation of features. There might be a wonderful, coherent design in the implementation that I can’t see, but the interface I use seems like a bunch on one-off features that don’t play well together.</i><p>Huh? Is this guy talking about Perl? Is he talking about the same Ruby I know? His criticisms don't make any sense. Ruby is well-organized and well thought-out. It's not without its flaws, but it has far fewer than Java or Perl. Hell, Ruby makes Perl look like Java.<p>(If he hates Ruby this much, I'd hate to imagine what he'd think of the gigantic featuritis-striken kludge called Java or J2EE.)
Who cares? It isn't like you and ruby are getting married.<p>If you have a project that ruby seems like a decent fit, use it. You'll get nowhere are learn nothing without actually doing.