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11
JAN
2012Experimenting With DATA
In the last article, I talked about the importance of a culture that encourages experimentation. It's hard to fiddle with something and not gain a better understanding of how it works. That knowledge is valuable to us programmers. I mentioned though that the way Perl programmers experiment is not the same way us Rubyists do it. Let me show you some actual Ruby experimentation I've witnessed over the years…
Executing Your Email
Some of Ruby's features are fairly obscure. Even worse, some of us who use those obscure features try to bend them to even stranger purposes. This is one way Rubyists like to experiment. Ironically, the features I'm going to talk about in this article are inherited from Perl.
Ruby can literally use your email as an executable program. Assume I have the following saved in a file called
email.txt:Dear Nuby: I just thought you would like to know what the Hello World program looks like in Ruby. Here's the code: #!/usr/bin/env ruby -w puts "Hello world!" __END__ I hope the simplicity of that inspires you to learn more. May Ruby Be With You, Ruby Jedi -
1
JAN
2012Perl's Golf Culture
I'm stealing some time to write this while on vacation. I am also under the weather. Given that, we'll make this article short and easier on me to think up. That's not always a bad thing though. There are plenty of simple concepts I would like to get across. For example, let's talk about how Perl programmers do what it is they do.
Ruby's Sister Language
I spent plenty of time in the Perl camps and I really learned a lot about programming there. That may shock you to hear, because Perl programmers often get a bad wrap from the rest of the programming community.
One reason they catch a lot flak is that their language is often terse to the point of obscurity. We joke that Perl is a "write only" language or too hard for other developers to read. That would be bad enough on its own, but Perl programmers seem to intentionally make this worse.
Perl programmers love to play the programmer's version of golf. That is writing a program with the fewest possible keystrokes. To shrink their program's size, they will resort to every dirty trick in the book, including:
