Ruby pioneers talk about the shortcomings of this programming language

Ruby pioneers talk about the shortcomings of this programming language

 

Ruby creators song benzihong and Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson make frank comments on the language.

As a dynamic language originally released in 1995, Ruby was widely praised for its convenience advantage and often appeared on the popular language selection list. However, Ruby has been under criticism for many years. In the face of this situation, the two most prominent members of the Ruby community are not afraid. They smile openly and look at the attacks and appreciation against the language.

Ruby's founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, a popular Ruby on Rails Web development framework, received an email interview from InfoWorld this week.

Ruby advantages

When talking about the advantages and shortcomings of the programming language he created, Song benhong seems to be a bit left blank. According to him, Ruby has "Concise characteristics and provides readable code ." In addition, Ruby also has "Better abstract capabilities, such as object-oriented programming, functional programming, and metaprogramming ."

He also pointed out that Ruby's performance is "Excellent enough for most cases ", at present, there are a lot of Ruby-related resources on the Internet, so the language "has an active Community system around the world." When listing Ruby's advantages, Matsu also mentioned Ruby on Rails and RubyGems Package Manager.

At the same time, Hansson first mentioned "Ruby is obviously highly concerned with the positive emotions of programmers" when listing the advantages of this language ". "From this focus, Ruby has an ideal user comfort and a strong aesthetic derived from convenience. Writing Ruby code is a simple and pleasant experience, and none of the other programming languages I have ever used can match this ."

He also said that the Ruby language also contains a variety of paradigms: "Ruby is an obvious post-modern programming language that extracts the essence from all mainstream programming paradigms. You can use it to implement object-oriented development as necessary, while functional programming can also be implemented in Ruby. I am amazed by its extensive capabilities and sophisticated programming principles ."

Ruby also finds an ideal balance between development and stability, Hansson pointed out. "The Ruby world is growing fast, but it is not so fast to confuse users-just like JavaScript. In addition, the pace of Ruby development has not slowed down to the point where it is stuck as Perl, or even as rare as Python 3. It clearly finds an excellent development track that suits you ."

Ruby short board

Speaking of the disadvantage, Song benhong said that Ruby's syntax may be too complex, and it is difficult for developers to grasp it completely at one time. In addition, Ruby "is at a low speed compared with static compilation languages such as Java or Scala ". In addition, there is a lack of rich applications and libraries in non-Web fields, such as research computing, but this problem is gradually solved with the establishment of the SciRuby project.

Speaking of speed, Hansson said, "Ruby is indeed not the best choice for some specific niche applications and Internet scale levels. This level of niche demand and scale is becoming increasingly relaxed and away from mainstream needs, but it still exists objectively. If we can use Ruby to deal with everything, we don't have to bend to Go, Rust, C, and other system-level languages, but this is not the case ."

At the same time, Ruby's expressiveness often makes DSL "too intelligent", Hansson pointed out. "If you like, you can compile Ruby code that looks similar to normal English. However, in general, sometimes it is not as good as 'totally different '. AppleScript has proved this to us with practical lessons. In my opinion, some of the very popular Ruby libraries seem to have gone astray in this regard ."

Http://www.infoworld.com/article/2870966/ruby/ruby-pioneers-come-clean-on-languages-shortcomings.html.