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@alex
Created January 17, 2013 01:57
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Ruby Mistakes
=============
* Using blocks for looping and callbacks
* break/next/return semantics in blocks extremely bizzare
* And they have different behavior in procs vs. lambdas
* Why on earth does defined? return a string?
* throw/catch. Why!
* Inline rescue, no ability to specify what exception (and by extension, "catch
anything" behavior common in community)
* Mutable objects have a hash method and can go in Hashes. Why!!!
* Extremely complex grammar, makes barrier to entry for implementation much
higher
* Special case of flip-flop and regexp in an if statement (only if it appears
syntactically though!)
* Setting `$=` to something truthy causes all string operations to become
case-insensitive. This and other magic globals from perl are mind blowing.
* Keywords that silently override methods by the same name (defined?, on
Rubinius block_given?)
* `f {}`. Tell me what the parsing of that is.
* proc, lambda, block, method, unbound method, functions. None of which have a
clear relationship. set_trace_func exists, even though you can't pass
functions around.
* Bizzare magic::
def f
Proc.new
end
f { |x| 3 }
How does ``Proc.new`` know where the block came from?
* Ruby's module system makes namespacing optional (and off by default).
* Regexp with named matches decompose into local variables. Dear lord why.
* Encoding system is beyond broken
* Scopes: constants, class vars, instance vars, methods, locals. wtf.
* Constants aren't constant. Truth in naming.
* Thread locals are really fiber locals.
* You can change the encoding of a string. Just jesus christ wow.
@drbig
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drbig commented Jan 17, 2013

This reminds me of the blub paradox...

@cogweh
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cogweh commented Jan 18, 2013

@Nek selective context "...because it doesn't work the same way as in a language I'm used to" This is basically frivolous bickering about the language which we shouldn't be having. The OP is clearly trying to point out what he perceives as flaws in a language without much basis. It's the same thing as saying "that car is red so it must be horrible."

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