extremely well balanced review of an emergent gem

I have been programming for more than twenty years. I have seen my fill of emergent languages that claim to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. Ruby truly is. It manages to combine the most important emergent programming techniques (e.g., iterators, closures, list comprehensions [although that actually dates back to the early 1960s, viz., LISP's "MAPCAR"]) into a thoughtfully conceived syntactic structure. I was astonished to find the pattern-slinging of Perl, the object orientation of Java (plus much stronger data structuring capabilities--something at which Java was always weak), and the generality of C--not to mention seamlessly integrated Tk GUI, UNIX shell (plus entire library of system calls and related "section 3" subroutines) support . Perhaps most remarkably, one can write Ruby programs at the bits-and-bytes level of a systems program or at the event-driven level of an interactive application. Like Ragu spaghetti sauce, "It's in there." (I could carp at some minor syntactic unpleasantries or some inconsistencies in naming conventions, but nothing's perfect.) Bravo, Matsumoto!

Other Reviews

• Good but weak in places.
• extremely well balanced review of an emergent gem
• Write code for the 21st century
• Quick and effective introduction to Ruby
• A nice fun book for programmers