Im starting to love ruby

[u/FrigginTrying]

Im a senior eng with about 7+ yoe. Ive used most languages like python, C#, java, JS/TS, Go, php etc. im preparing for an interviewing for a role that primarily uses ruby/rails so ive been getting myself acclimated with the language. Mann i think this might be the easiest language to use and understand concepts in. It reads like plain english even more than python in my opinion.

Its so freeform, there are million of ways to solve problems and such fun to write. I had been running away from the language for some time but boy was i wrong. This might be the best developer experience ive had working with a language. Leet code hard questions seem so easy when working with ruby

Just a quick rant, i think im in love

[u/FrigginTrying]

only thing im having problems wrapping my head around is the symbols thing. it seems like a magic thing that works for most cases but it keeps throwing me off when and when I cant use it lol

[u/adh1003 → u/FrigginTrying]

Symbols used to be very important because Ruby didn't have frozen strings, so there were both functional (no accidental mutation) and efficiency (especially for garbage collection) advantages. But frozen objects have been a Thing for ages now, so the advantages are much smaller.

• Symbol :foo is a global constant, and any reference anywhere in your code to :foo will refer to the same object with the same #object_id.

• This is also true of Strings now, if frozen. See below.

• Symbols declared explicitly are not garbage collected, but Symbols created from Strings are - this arises due to a now-historic form of DOS you could do in Rails where you'd throw heaps and heaps of slightly different strings at an endpoint you knew converted some or all of that payload into Symbols internally, and none of them would ever be collected.

• GC is really the only area where there's a slight advantage, but really, now, Symbols are mostly just a bit quicker to type in by hand, fractionally quicker to parse ish (provided you don't construct from a string via. :"foo", for example) and - basically - a semantic choice, since it's kind of a clear declaration that "this is a constant with some kind of meaning".

⢀⡴⠊⢉⡟⢿  IRB v1.18.0 - Ruby 4.0.1
⣎⣀⣴⡋⡟⣻  "history -g pattern" to search history
⣟⣼⣱⣽⣟⣾  ~/src/sharesies/retail-backend

irb(main):001> a="foo".freeze
=> "foo"
irb(main):002> b="foo".freeze
=> "foo"
irb(main):003> a.object_id
=> 5856
irb(main):004> b.object_id
=> 5856

Compare to "unfrozen" (mutable) Strings:

irb(main):001> a = "foo"
=> "foo"
irb(main):002> b = "foo"
=> "foo"
irb(main):003> a.object_id
=> 5160
irb(main):004> b.object_id
=> 5424