Jeremy Smith's blog

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A Couple of Notes Concerning my First Outings with Ruby

So I've finally dove into something slightly more complicated than "Hello, World!" style scripts (← how's that for some long text linkage).

First notes, when I program in a language that doesn't have sigils in front of the variables, my brain gets confused and thinks it is programming Javascript. I get a Pavlovian response of pain as I shudder at the thought of having to write document.getElementByID 500 times. I had this same brain-switching problem when I was constantly going back and forth with PHP and Perl. I drop from PHP to Perl and start writing lines and lines of code with $ symbols in front of arrays and hashes. Perl would obviously become very unhappy. It was even worse when I would write Perl code in the .php files.

That one section of code:

user.attributes.sort_by{ |attr| attr }.each{ |attr| 
  user.send(attr.to_sym).each{ |value| puts "#{attr}: #{value}" } 
}

If I wasn't originally a Perl programmer, that probably would have looked more like: 

user.attributes.sort_by{ |attr| attr }.each do |attr| 
  values = user.send(attr.to_sym)
	
  values.each do |value|
    puts "#{attr}: #{value}"
  end
end

And I don't know if this just means I've been programming with Perl too long, but Ruby certainly feels strangely familiar. Perl++ of a kind.

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