WebWriting.com

Ruby is truly infuriating. Not only are there six dozen different ways to instantiate a string but they vary in subtle ways. Single quotes interpret escaped characters and double quotes don’t and anything followed by percent becomes a quote terminator and even though double less than appends to strings, when followed by any non-space they also become a quote terminator and you call it a here document. And you can quote the terminators. So while a << "b" will add "b" to a, a <<"b" will expect a bunch of text followed by a freestanding "b" that terminates the here document. I can only imagine the BNF.

Why does anyone willingly write in this language?

Things that annoy me (when coding it’s all in the syntax):

• elsif is missing an e
• resuce should be called catch or except or anything else but rescue
• there are five dozen ways to say if x then y
• :symbols
• @@globals
• case/when isn’t switch/case
• parens to functions are optional

The combination of the above leads to things that are nigh unparsable:

begin @@master = case @slave when :dude: “dud” when :man: “chicken” else “rub” end if eyes.poke_out? elsif puts “Go learn python” resuce me