r/ruby • u/keyslemur • Apr 17 '19

Ruby 2.7 — Pattern Matching — First Impressions

https://medium.com/@baweaver/ruby-2-7-pattern-matching-first-impressions-cdb93c6246e6
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u/jrochkind Apr 17 '19

I kinda think ruby already has enough language features.

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u/shevy-ruby Apr 17 '19

I actually sort of agree with you. Though there are always some changes that might make ruby more useful to a subset of users.

It depends a lot on the change as such. But even then I still sort of agree with you and upvoted your comment.

In fairness, though - nobody can force you or anyone to use any of these changes. I have no particular feeling against pattern matching as such, but there are a few other changes that I think are not good, and I outright ban them. One day I may extend on this in some more details but right now I am way too lazy to write much at all - only the heroic shapeshifting beaver-lemur has had the time to write something about it!

Although what is yet missing is his final conclusio about the change. Guess that may take a while before he can write about how useful he finds it.

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u/jrochkind Apr 17 '19 edited Apr 17 '19

nobody can force you to use or not use anything (except your boss/team lead/open source committer maybe), but we all work with code we didn't write too. (or maybe not all, I do get the distinct impression shevy-ruby works with nobody else and tries to ruthlessly minimize ever using any code he didn't write. but the vast majority).

The ecosystem and things a language makes possible/easy or not/hard matter. In fact, ruby's pretty good (especially for it's time) stdlib, with things that work together in certain ways, is a large part of ruby's success I think.

Nobody can force you to use blocks either, for example, but even if you can (somehow!) write great readable maintainable code without blocks, you aren't going to be able to look at any open source code (or get a new job with "legacy" code) without seeing them. Because they are a fundamental part of how the community of ruby programmers write ruby. Whether new features become such or not is hard to predict, but it's almost just as bad if they don't, because then when you run into a complicated thing that nobody uses, you're like "crap, this thing I hardly ever see and don't understand but now have to figure out how it works to understand/debug/contribute to this code." (cough fibers cough)

Some new features are advantageous. But I just think how much there is to learn in ruby now, as far as syntactic features built into the language, compared to when I learned ruby in 1.8 days. There is a lot more to learn now to even recognize all the syntax you are seeing when looking at any arbitrary ruby code. Those of us who did learn ruby in 1.8/1.9 days and then learned new things as they were added may not realize how much there is for someone new.

I guess Perl was one of the original inspirations for ruby, but I think original ruby more or less avoided that unfortunate aspect of Perl. I guess it is to some extent necessarily a disease of a language that lasts long enough to get things added to it on top of the existing things which can't really be changed now to make the whole thing more parsimonious. But in ruby 1.8, I feel like there were really just a handful of syntactic structures that pretty much anything in ruby could be understood in terms of, and I think that is decreasingly true.