Talk:Ruby (programming language)

Magic Global

Alternatively, the most recent exception is stored in the magic global $!.

Is $! really considered a magic global? It feels like an unnecessary adjective. Simply stating "the global $!" seems adequate.

Adamstegman (talk) 15:21, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

All variables that start with a $ are "global variables.2 I do not know who came up with the word "magic global", I think it is a misnomer. Nothing in the source of ruby refers to anything as a "magic global". However, not all global variables are the same in ruby. $1 $2 etc... are somewhat special and volatile, used for regexes. They may tend to "disappear" more rapidly than other variables, when you use a new =~ regex check. 193.83.131.214 (talk) 11:21, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Official Logo

The ruby site uses the same logo as on this page, which is the one everybody knows. However, one of the news pages on the official site appears to indicate that the official logo is the one that the Ruby Association hosts on their site at http://www.ruby-assn.org/en/logo.htm

Could somebody please check with Matz to see if that is really more official than his own logo (the one currently shown on the page)? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.254.237.152 (talk) 06:23, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Initial purpose?

Did it have an initial purpose except "promoting fun and productivity" (which is pretty much "good and good")? Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 08:50, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes. Matz liked perl, but he felt he could do it better. So he wrote ruby, for his own use (more or less). 193.83.131.214 (talk) 11:19, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Implementations of Ruby 1.9

The section start off with ...

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The newest version of Ruby, the recently released version 1.9, has a single working implementation written in C that utilizes a Ruby-specific virtual machine.

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... however, JRuby currently provides a 1.9.2 compliant VM as evidenced on the JRuby page. 122.170.48.143 (talk) 07:25, 10 June 2011 (UTC)

Strong typing

Hello, why was "Strong Typing" removed from the list of typing disciplines? --Cokaban (talk) 10:28, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

'Repositories and Libraries' not up to date

The data mentioned is outdated and the predominant role of RubyGems not adequately described. 95.208.117.113 (talk) 10:12, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

mruby

matz is working on mruby, a light variant of ruby, a bit similar to lua. Should the main article mention mruby eventually? The link to the github page is at: https://github.com/mruby/mruby I suppose one day mruby may be ready, and then the main article could have a small subsection about mruby. 193.83.131.214 (talk) 11:23, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Is Ruby a "C family" programming language?

Please see Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2014_October_24#Category_talk:C_programming_language_family. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:20, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

A suggestion for the lede: include the fact that Ruby is free

I am fully aware that what goes into the lede is a touchy subject where outsiders are usually wrong. But I went to Wikipedia with the sole purpose of knowing whether Ruby is freely available, something any devotee of open source learning would want to know. I had to go past the lede to learn that Ruby costs nothing. --- Just something to think about. --guyvan52 (talk) 01:57, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

OK, I just found the info in the box situated in the lede. I am not qualified to address the question of whether you want to include the word "free" in the first three or four sentences.

Nonsense claim in the metaprogramming section

"To implement the equivalent in many other languages, the programmer would have to write each method (in_black, in_red, in_green, etc.) separately."

That is absurd: I have worked in over a dozen languages, and I can't think of one of them where one would need to write a method per color! In C, for instance, you would write a print_in_color() function, and pass in an array index (e.g., 'BLUE') for which HTML code you wanted to output. This appears to have been written by someone who has not programmed in any language but Ruby. GeneCallahan (talk) 19:32, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm certainly no fan of Ruby (currently struggling with it for work...) but this claim seems legitimate. The result is that the user can write "in_blue(x)", the fact that blue is chosen is part of the identifier for the function. You are saying "blue" can be passed as an argument to the function but that is different. I would suspect lisp can do this pretty easily, and probably most interpreted languages can do something like this but perhaps using non-portable code specific to a given interpreter.Spitzak (talk) 21:45, 2 March 2015 (UTC)