Sometimes less is more
October 19th, 2006
Update: A lot of people were disappointed that 10.minutes.ago etc. is not working in pure Ruby. Well, after executing the line require ‘active_support’ it does - I think this is a fairly small thing to do to enable these powerful features.
Every guide published on favorable writing principles emphasizes the power of brief and concise style. This is especially true in the case of technical texts, and in my opinion, in the case of well-designed programming languages as well.
Note the word well-designed. I did not say in the case of any (programming) language, since that would just not be true: conciseness can come at the cost of readability. (If you ever tried to read kanji, you know what I am talking about 
. However, I am claiming that in the case of a really well-designed programming language, succinctness helps readability, reduces bloat and leads to easier and faster understanding of the code. In my experience, the amount of boilerplate code to write is decreasing proportionally with the terseness of the programming language, ultimately leading to a coding style where you (nearly) don’t need to write boilerplate at all.
I will demonstrate this on a few Java vs. Ruby code examples. However, this is NOT a Ruby-bashing-Java article, but a few examples of idioms and interesting constructs; C++ vs Haskell or Lisp could serve equally well (sometimes even better), but since I am currently working with Java and Ruby on a daily basis, it is easier for me to use them.
If you are a pro Ruby and/or Java programmer, and/or you think the article is too long for you, please jump to the “Random Code Snippets” section.
Possibly the most straightforward reason why Ruby code is more readable even in shorter form is that really everything is an object [1] in Ruby-land. For example in Java, primitives need wrapper classes to ‘become’ objects., while in Ruby they are first class objects on their own. This makes constructs like
10.times { print "ho" } #=> "hohohohohohohohohoho"
or (will output the same string)
print "ho" * 10 #=> "hohohohohohohohohoho"possible.
There are a handful of other reasons which make Ruby more readable and elegant, but before I get bogged down in the explanation too much, let’s see the examples!
Whetting your appetite
In the first part I will describe some basic constructs which would make the life of any Java developer much easier. These techniques are neat, but they are not using any really sophisticated stuff yet: I will try to take a look at those in the next bigger section.
The empty program
Java:
class Test
{
public static void main(String args[]) {}
}
Ruby:
I did not forget the Ruby snippet; You can not see anything there because actually a Ruby program doing nothing is exactly 0 characters long. On the other hand, the Java version is slightly longer. I is kind of weird to explain to a newcomer what do ‘class’, ‘public’, ’static’, ‘void’, ‘String’, the [] operator and several braces here and there mean, and why are they needed if the program does literally nothing…
Fun with numbers
Note:For some of the next examples you will need to use Rails Active Support.
Java:
if ( 1 % 2 == 1 ) System.err.println("Odd!") #=> Odd!
Ruby:
if 11.odd? print "Odd!" #=> Odd!Does not the first example make more sense (even for a non-programmer)?. I believe it does. More of this type:
Java:
102 * 1024 * 1024 + 24 * 1024 + 10 #=> 106979338
Ruby:
102.megabytes + 24.kilobytes + 10.bytes #=> 106979338
OK, maybe this is an unfair comparison since Java does not have (?) those functions. However, the point is that even if it had, the best I could come up with would look like:
Util.megaBytes(102) + Util.kiloBytes(24) + Util.bytes(10) #=> 106979338
Which is far from the elegance and readability of the Ruby example.
In the next example we will assume that we have a Java function similar to ordinalize in Ruby.
Java:
System.err.println("Currently in the" + Util.ordinalize(2) + "trimester");
Ruby:
print "Currently in the #{2.ordinalize} trimester" #=> "Currently in the 2nd trimester"
In this example we can observe variable interpolation: anything wrapped in #{} inside double quotes gets evaluated and substituted in the string, providing a more readable form without a lot of + + Java constructs (which is cool mainly if you have more variables inside the double quotes).
Dates
In my opinion, handling dates and times is a great PITA in Java, especially if you are implementing some complex code.
Java:
System.out.println("Running time: " + (3600 + 15 * 60 + 10) + "seconds");
Ruby:
puts "Running time: #{1.hour + 15.minutes + 10.seconds} seconds"
Java:
new Date(new Date().getTime() - 20 * 60 * 1000)
Ruby:
20.minutes.ago
Java:
Date d1 = new GregorianCalendar(2006,9,6,11,00).getTime(); Date d2 = new Date(d1.getTime() - (20 * 60 * 1000));
Ruby:
20.minutes.until("2006-10-9 11:00:00".to_time)
I think you do not have to be biased towards Ruby at all to admit which code makes more sense instantly…
I have recently found a very cool way of parsing dates in Ruby: using Chronic. However, I would not like to present it here since it is not a feature of the language, ‘just’ a nifty natural-language date parser [2].
A little bit more advanced stuff
Classes
Java:
Class Circle
private Coordinate center, float radius;
public void setCenter(Coordinate center)
{
this.center = center;
}
public Coordinate getCenter()
{
return center;
}
public void setRadius(float radius)
{
this.radius = radius;
}
public Coordinate getRadius()
{
return radius;
}
end;
Ruby:
class Circle attr_accessor :center, :radius end
Believe it or not, the two code snippets are absolutely equal; The getter and setter methods in Ruby code are generated automatically, so not only you do not have to write them, but they are not even there to clutter the code.
I have seen argumentation from Java guys that stuff like this (i.e. the public static void main … thing, getters/setters and other boilerplate code) can be generated with any decent GUI like Eclipse (or by tools like XDoclet etc) is a non-issue. Well, as for their generation, let us say this is true. But for the readability of code it is absolutely not!
For example. take getters/setters: Every variable in Java ads 8 more lines of code (not counting the lines between the function declarations) compared to the Ruby :attr_accessor idiom. That is, a simple class definition having 10 fields in Java will have 80+ lines of code compared to 1 lines of the same code in Ruby. For me, this definitely means a big difference.
Arrays (and other containers)
This section was inspired by a blog entry by Steve Yegge.
Arrays are interesting citizens of Java: They are not really objects in the “classical” sense , so they have very limited functionality compared to first-class Java objects. On the other hand, they are offering a huge advantage over the other container classes: they can be easily initialized.
Java:
String languages[] = new String[] {"Java", "Ruby", "Python", "Perl"};
instead of
List<String> languages = new LinkedList<String>();
languages.add("Java");
languages.add("Ruby");
languages.add("Python");
languages.add("Perl");
which is kind of lame when you quickly need to hack up some testing data.
However, they have also some serious problems: you have to define the number of the elements upon construction time, like so:
Java:
String someOtherLanguages<String>[] = new String[15];which sometimes really cripples their functionality. [3]
How does this work in Ruby? Let’s see on three different examples (All three code snippets provide the same result):
Ruby:
stuff = [] #An empty array - as you can see there is no need to define the size stuff << “Java”, “Ruby”, “Python” #Add some elements #Initialize the array with the values stuff = [”Java”, “Ruby”, “Python”] #Yet another method yielding the same result stuff = %w(Java Ruby Python)
In my opinion, these forms (especially the last one) are more straightforward and can save a lot of typing.
Another major shortcoming of Java arrays is that besides the [] operator you have only the methods inherited from Object and a single instance variable : length [4]. This means that even essential functionality like sorting, selecting elements based on something etc. has to be done via a ‘third party’ function, like this:
Java:
Arrays.sort(languages);which seemed quite normal to me when I have been learning Java and have had no previous experience with dynamic languages, but now it looks kind of annoying.
Another Java-container-woe compared to Ruby is that in Java, an array is an array. A list is a list. A stack is a stack. If you are wondering what the hell I am talking about, check out these Ruby code snippets: Ruby:
stuff = %w(Java Ruby Python) #Add the string “Perl” to the array stuff << “Perl” #Prepend the string “Ocaml” stuff.unshift “Ocaml” => [”OCaml”, “Java”, “Ruby”, “Python”, “Perl”] #Use the array as a stack stuff.pop => “Perl” #stuff is now [”OCaml”, “Java”, “Ruby”, “Python”] stuff.push “C”, “LISP” => [”OCaml”, “Java”, “Ruby”, “Python”, “C”, “LISP”] #Update C to C++ stuff[4] = “C++” => [”OCaml”, “Java”, “Ruby”, “Python”, “C++”, “LISP”] #Remove the fisrt element stuff.shift => “OCaml” #stuff is now [”Java”, “Ruby”, “Python”, “C++”, “LISP”] #Let’s just stick with Java and Ruby - slice out the rest! stuff.slice!(2..4) => [”Python”, “C++”, “LISP”] #stuff is now [”Java”, “Ruby”]As you can see, the Ruby Array class offers functionality that could be achieved only by mixing up several Java containers into one (to my knowledge, at least) [5]. In practice, this usually speeds things up a lot.
Another thing that really annoys me when using containers in Java is the lack of this functionality:
Ruby:
stuff = ["OCaml", "Java", "Ruby", "Python", "C++", "LISP"] #Lua is just gaining steam, add it to the 7th place stuff[7] = “Lua” => [”OCaml”, “Java”, “Ruby”, “Python”, “C”, “LISP”, nil, “Lua”]i.e. that if I am adding an element to an index which is bigger than the size of the array, the empty space inbetween is filled with nils. Now seriously, who would not exchange this for the Java behaviour (an IndexOutOfBoundsException is thrown) - after all, if I would need this functionality (which is VERY seldomly the case) in Ruby, I could check it myself and raise an exception if I don’t like what I see.
I wanted to write a bit about differences between hashes and files in Ruby and Java, but the post is already longer now then I wanted it to be so I guess I will just show some concrete code snippets to conclude.
Random Code Snippets
In this section I would like to present some real cases I have been solving with Ruby recently. Since I am still new to Ruby, I was totally amazed just how much more simpler, shorter yet much more understandable the code can be in Ruby compared to Java.
Files and Regular Expressions
As Bruce Eckel once put it, In Java, it’s a research project to open a file. Well, I have to agree. Maybe I am the only one Java programmer (besides Bruce) who - even after using Java professionally for five years - still can not write to a file without using google first. Maybe I should learn it one day?
Regular expression support in java is OK (at least one does not have to use external packages as in the pre-1.4 era), however, compared to Ruby the syntax is quite heavy.
Let’s see a demonstration on the following task: Open the file ‘test.txt’ and write all the sentences to the console (one sentence per line) which contain the word ‘Ruby’. First, the Java solution:Java
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
public class Test
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
try {
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("test.txt"));
StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
String str;
while ((str = in.readLine()) != null)
{ sb.append(str + "\n"); }
in.close();
String result = sb.toString();
Pattern sentencePattern = Pattern.compile("(.*?\\.)\\s+?");
Pattern javaPattern = Pattern.compile("Ruby");
Matcher matcher = sentencePattern.matcher(result);
while (matcher.find()) {
String match = matcher.group();
Matcher matcher2 = javaPattern.matcher(match);
if (matcher2.find())
System.err.println(match);
}
} catch (IOException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
It is quite straightforward what this relatively simple code snippet doing - but if this is straightforward, what should I say about the Ruby version?Ruby
File.read('test.txt').scan(/.*?\. /).each { |s| puts s if s =~ /Ruby/ }
Well, umm… I guess this example quite much expresses the point I am talking about from the beginning: sometimes less is more, a.k.a. Succinctness is Power!
Again, I wanted to show much more examples, but I have the feeling that since the article is already too long, no one would read it 
It is a big pity since I did not even talk about hashes, blocks, closures, metaprogramming (well, I will mention it briefly in the last (really ) example) and other goodies - maybe in part 2?
If this is still not enough…
Although I find it very easy and natural to express a lots of things in Ruby, the language can not offer anything I would ever need. However, there is a powerful concept to invoke in such situations, called metaprogramming.
A few days ago I needed to test some algorithms on trees, so I needed to hack up a lot of tree test data. Here is how I would go about this in Java using the example below (let’s assume in both languages that we have a simple data structure Tree):
a
/ \
b c
/ \ / | \
d e f g h
Java
Tree a = new Tree("a");
Tree b = new Tree("b");
Tree c = new Tree("c");
a.addChild(b);
a.addChild(c);
Tree d = new Tree("d");
Tree e = new Tree("e");
b.addChild(d);
b.addchild(e);
Tree f = new Tree("f");
Tree g = new Tree("g");
Tree h = new Tree("h");
c.addChild(f);
c.addChild(g);
c.addChild(h);
Another possibility would be to create an XML file with the description of the tree and parse it from there. This solution is even more convenient since though you have to write the parsing code, you just have to edit an XML file once it is written. One possibility how the tree of this example could look something like
XML
<node name="a">
<node name="b">
<node name="d"/>
<node name="e"/>
</node>
<node name="c">
<node name="f"/>
<node name="g"/>
<node name="h"/>
</node>
</node>
The latter solution is quite cool. After all you do not need to write any code, just alter the XML file and that’s it.
Now let’s see the Ruby solution I came up with:
Ruby
tree = a {
b { d e }
c { f g h }
}
Well… suddenly even the XML file seems too heavy, does not it? Not to mention the fact that the latter example is pure Ruby code - there is no need to open an external file and parse it - you just run it and the variable tree will contain your tree. That’s it.
Of course Ruby can not handle this code as it is - for this we need to invoke some metaprogramming magic. [6]
Metaprogramming is a way to drive Ruby with Ruby. Java (especially J2EE) is usually driven by XML (which is not always really a good thing in my opinion) As you could see, Ruby is driven by Ruby instead
This example merely scratched the surface of Ruby’s possibilities through metaprogramming. However, as with the other examples, my goal was not to advocate a concrete pattern/method over a different one, but rather to show how a specific toolset can change the way of thinking about the task at hand, and the way of code design/implementation in general.
Final thoughts
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. - The Bible, I Corinthians 13:11
This thought pretty well expresses how I felt about Java/C++/(substitute any non-dynamic language here) when I came to know (some of) Ruby’s true dynamism and expressive power through terse yet powerful idioms which transformed my whole thinking about programming. Of course I do not claim that I ‘became a man’ because that’s still a very long way to go, but still, even with my very limited knowledge of Ruby, the way to express things in Java/C++ now seems… well… childish . [7]
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Notes
[1] I wonder whether this déjà vu will happen to me in the future once again: I have had this ‘Wow, everything is an object’ feeling when coming from C++ to Java; Then after coming from Java to Python; and most recently, after coming from Python to Ruby. Back
[2] Some examples that Chronic can handle:
summer 6 in the morning tomorrow this tuesday last winter this morning 3 years ago 1 week hence 7 hours before tomorrow at noon 3rd wednesday in november 4th day last weekKudos… Back
[3] In the previous array initialization example this was not needed since it is trivial when all the elements are stated beforehand.Back
[4]which somewhat confusing given that all the other containers use the method size() (and not a field!) to determine the count of elements. To nicely mesh with the confusion, the String object provides the method length() (and not a field, as with array) to query the number of characters… Back
[5] I mean it is not possible to construct any container - other than an array - with literals, you can use the [] operator on arrays only, you can not get the i-th element of a stack etc. Back
[6] The code I have been using to accomplish this task relies on the method_missing idiom:
class Object
@stack = []
@parent = nil
def method_missing(method_name, *args, &block)
tree = Tree.new(method_name)
@parent.add_child(tree) if @parent != nil
if block_given?
@stack ||=[]
@parent = tree
@stack.push @parent
yield block
@stack.pop
@parent = @stack.last
end
tree
end
end
Back
[7] This does not necessarily mean that Java is bad and Ruby is good - just that it was the ‘Ruby way’ that struck a chord in me after trying/playing around with programming in many programming languages. Many of the features I adore in Ruby are there in Java as well, but they did not ‘came through’ whereas with Ruby there was a point of enlightenment when I really understood a lot of generic, non-language specific principles. Back
tags:FireWatir Java Ruby Tutorial
October 19th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
Sometimes less is more…
“Interesting review of some Ruby vs Java idioms, with source code. More problems are solved with both languages for comparison. One of them is pretty funny: it requires 25+ lines of Java code (can you shrink it in a meaningful way?), and 1 line of Rub…
October 19th, 2006 at 10:27 pm
[…] October 19th, 2006 in Links Sometimes less is more, a comparison of several Java and Ruby constructs. […]
October 20th, 2006 at 12:50 am
Sometimes less is more…
Review of some Ruby vs Java idioms, with source code. More problems are solved with both languages for comparison (to show how much Ruby rocks!
….
October 20th, 2006 at 6:11 am
Most Ruby code in this article runs nearly 1:1 in Groovy. I think that is very funny, because many people say that Groovy looks too much like Java… wouldn’t that mean that Ruby does look too much like Java too? Anyway, the tree example would have to be changed a little in Groovy:
tree = a {
b { d; e }
c { f; g; h }
}
which gives them a little different meaning than in the Ruby version, but the result would look the same.
For all not knowing it, Groovy is a dynamic language working on the JVM with very good integration in Java, closures, meta programming, operator overloading, native syntax for lists, maps, BigInteger/BigDecimal and much more http://groovy.codehaus.org
October 20th, 2006 at 6:28 am
Maybe a stupid question, but how are Groovy and JRuby related? I don’t mean technically but whether the functionality they offer makes them competitors or they serve a different purpose, or … ?
October 20th, 2006 at 7:35 am
102.megabytes + 24.kbytes + 10.bytes #=> 106979338
Where exactly do these methods (and ordinalize) come from? I don’t recall them being part of Ruby’s standard library, and indeed, if you fire up irb, they’re not there. Perhaps these are specific to Rails?
October 20th, 2006 at 7:52 am
Peter:
JRuby is an attempt to implement the whole Ruby language on the JVM. So it’s like Jython in that respect. The advantage is that programmers who understand the Ruby idioms can apply them to the JVM. The disadvantage is that it sufferes from a degree of “impedance mismatch” when interfacing to Java APIs (e.g. selecting between methods with the same name and number of parameters but with different parameter types when making a method call).
Groovy is a language specifically designed to run on the JVM and to interface tighly with Java libraries. The advantage is that Groovy can easily call Java APIs and can expose APIs which are directly callable from Java. Groovy supports optional typing of variables and Groovy compiles to bytecode (JRuby does not compile to byecode yet but they plan to in the future). The disadvantage is that you have to learn a new language (although if you know java it’s pretty easy to get started) and you can’t apply your language knowlege outside the JVM.
So Groovy does not compete with Ruby outside the JVM.
Disclosure: I’m a Groovy comitter. I joinded the Groovy project 3 years ago because I wanted a dynamic language on the JVM and I didn’t like the Ruby Perlishness. (and I still don’t like Ruby’s Perl influences!)
October 20th, 2006 at 8:40 am
@Chris:
The section “Fun with numbers” begins with the line:
“Note: For some of the next examples you will need to use Rails Active Support.”
My goal was to show the “5.do_something” syntax on interesting examples, and I have thought the functions I have used were more self-explanatory and interesting than say 5.step or 5.round.
October 20th, 2006 at 10:36 am
Just as an extra data point in addition to John Wilson’s contrast between JRuby and Groovy and the blog entry in general.
The original article shows two aspects when comparing Java and Ruby:
1. Disparity between syntactical/language features (pure OO, blocks, misc convenience syntax)
2. Library comparison (Ruby library has these features Java is lacking)
JRuby and Groovy help in both these areas for a Java programmer. For 2 in particular:
-Groovy has made a bunch of additional helpful libraries
-JRuby leverages Ruby’s existing libraries (and we are starting to also create our own helpful libraries where it is not solved by a Ruby library)
-Tom
JRuby Core developer
October 20th, 2006 at 11:36 am
I didn’t like the Java versions of these, so I rewrote them myself, with a few other general comments too.
See http://rickyclarkson.blogspot.com/2006/10/fairer-brevity-comparison-between-ruby.html
Cheers. I wish more of the Ruby examples hadn’t needed external libraries, I wanted to see 20.minutes.ago run! I’m not a Ruby developer, just happen to have it installed via Cygwin.
October 20th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
@Ricky:
10.times { ROTFL } I knew I should have put there my picture where I am posing in my Armani suit so I would look more professional. Too late now.
Nice article. I liked the “Peter Szinek, who appears to like being photographed with camels” part the most
About the rest: Some very good points and some I would argue with. However, my goal is not to argue at all, because the point of my post was something different.
The thing is that the title of my article was neither ‘Java can not be forced to do things that are natural in Ruby’ nor ‘How to golf Java code to reduce it’s size’ or
‘Simulating Ruby idioms with weird external Java packages’.
I think my examples reflect the way a typical Java/Ruby programmer would try to solve such a problem on a typical workday, and that was what I wanted to show.
It is not likely that Java Joe will go to google code search to find a function that repeats a string n times. The other problem is that this does not change the fact that 20 is not an object in Java. Besides this, his method will work for strings only, while in Ruby ‘times’ accepts a custom block. That’s a big difference.
OK, anyway, as I said I don’t want to argue too much. I did not want to bash Java - I just blogged about that I like the “Ruby way” more. We are different, and Ruby (or Java) is not for everyone - and this is very good so.
October 20th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
I really have to agree with the properties area. C# improved over Java but the Ruby example made it a lot easier for simple properties. Of course most of my GET methods return something simple but my SET methods might perform various actions which was not addressed here.
My point being - I wish Java had a better property syntax instead of the forced separate Get / Set methods
October 20th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
I know what you mean about the block, and I don’t doubt your points, I just thought it was slightly unfair. My guess is that your Ruby code was better than your Java code, though it’s only a guess, as I don’t know Ruby.
The block thing is why I am interested in functional programming in Java, so I can do things like (generics with [] because there is no preview button):
public static [T] T times(Block[T] block,int reps,Function[Pair[T,T],T] combinator)
{
}
Block defines a single method, T run(), and Function[T,R] defines a single method, R run(T input);
Then that can be called as, imagining Java had closures already:
times({”ho”},10,(pair){pair.first()+pair.second()});
Without closures, I tend to do things like make an anonymous class and assign an instance of that to a local variable; works well for me:
Block[String] ho=new BlockString
{
public String run()
{
return “ho”;
}
};
etc., then times(ho,10,concat);
I know Java’s far from ideal for this, but it’s what I know best, what I get paid for, and apart from not supporting tail recursion optimisation, it is ‘just enough’ for functional programming. Haskell’s syntax still scares me, even though the concepts make a lot of sense. Probably sometime I’ll view Haskell’s syntax as the logical next step, and the result of the closures debate for Java will probably help me decide whether to stick or twist!
“nor ‘How to golf Java code to reduce it’s size’ “
I considered calling it Ruby and Java golf
The camel thing was cool, when I find a picture of me doing salsa dancing without looking really sweaty, I’ll probably use that. I only looked at that page because I couldn’t see your name here.
October 20th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
Nice post Peter, it was a fun read. I took the liberty of implementing some of your examples in the most recent version of Java’s closest analogue, C# … I think it bridges the brevity gap to some extent.
http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2006/10/channeling-ruby-in-csharp-3.ashx
October 21st, 2006 at 4:10 pm
October 22nd, 2006 at 9:40 am
I’m a Ruby fan, but even I wonder whether the ‘Ruby way’ of throwing an endless amount of methods into base classes is such a great idea. Java may lack a lot of the shortcuts and hacks of more dynamic languages, but it makes up for this with a reassuring verbosity. Compelling arguments can be made in both directions, and it depends whether you prefer a lighter base with extensions caked on top or a heavier base with extensions caked on top
October 22nd, 2006 at 11:03 am
This post is further proof of a point I’ve made numerous times: Ruby developers are obsessed with Java.
October 22nd, 2006 at 11:53 am
new FileReader(”mystuff.txt”);
Ruby /is/ more concise than Java - there’s no need to exaggerate. Ruby was designed to be an object-oriented scripting language - Java was not designed to be a scripting language.
October 22nd, 2006 at 6:00 pm
Ricky Clarkson showed appropriate use of readFully to read all of a file.
The Regular Expressions example has other wierdness, why would we take off “\n” and then put them back
instead of doing block reads?
October 23rd, 2006 at 2:38 am
Well, I guess someone has missed the point here…
I think this is a great article, that shows ONE aspect of MANY. It does not point out that Ruby is THE solution for everything and is the gem of all programing languages. It simply said: Ruby handles some sort of problems with greater ease. I do not feel that there is a need to prove that Java is the best, or at least as good at these aspects as Ruby. Well, if you think that, I have to disappoint you: both of the languages have their strong and weak points.
October 23rd, 2006 at 4:45 am
@Isaac:
you said: “Ricky Clarkson showed appropriate use of readFully to read all of a file.”
could you maybe point me to a function in java, that simply reads the whole content of a file into a byte-array,
WITHOUT having me to manually allocate a buffer to hold the file-content?
for me it simply seems strange/stupid/idiotic to not have such a method in a standard library.
YES, i realize that sometimes that file might be very large, so it’s not always a good idea to read in the whole file etc, etc, etc.but sometimes i KNOW that the file is small enough, so why can’t i just load in the file?
@everyone-who-thinks-that-it-is-not-fair-to-compare-the-libraries-of-the-languages:
a programming language is not just the syntax and the compiler/virtual-machine/etc… it’s also it’s standard library. so i don’t think there’s anything wrong with comparing them.
October 23rd, 2006 at 11:05 am
@yoggie
Ruby /does/ handle some problems with greater ease - the problem is that this article presents some Java examples which will seem bogus to Java programmers
@Gábor Farkas
Why?
afaik Ruby doesn’t handle UTF-16 in a standard library - does that seem strange/stupid/idiotic?
October 24th, 2006 at 6:02 am
“102.megabytes + 24.kbytes + 10.bytes”
And you have 102.véka, 24.mázsa, 10.tenyér too?
Or only precoded units of measure? I know, I know. The point is: you have a predefined set, which are either useful for you, or they are not.
And if I would say “102.kilogram + 24.inch + 10.bytes” would it throw an error?
Or the compiler will scream?
print “Currently in the #{2.ordinalize} trimester” #=> “Currently in the 2nd trimester”
I don’t know if it helps, when most of the time I would like something like:
print “Jelenleg a #{2.ordinalize} félévben” #=> “Jelenleg a 2-dik félévben”
A lot of these “make it easier” stuff only helps if you write for english locales.
Would it work with danish, czecha, slovakian, russian, hungarian etc. ?
I doubt.
It is eye-candy, but not much use for a lot of people - yeah, everyone should change to english, forget the other languages, would make it easier, wouldn’t it?
- when they write for a local audiance.
“The getter and setter methods in Ruby code are generated automatically”
Do I really want that? Can I prevent it from happening? I want to
“[2] Some examples that Chronic can handle:
summer
6 in the morning
tomorrow
this tuesday
last winter
this morning
3 years ago
1 week hence
7 hours before tomorrow at noon
3rd wednesday in november
4th day last week
“
See my problems with these stuff being useless when you are not an english speaking person.
I wonder if it could handle : “Holnap, 7 órával dél előtt”.
BTW, I am not a java programmer - though I code in java at times -, I am a Delphi programmer, outcast of both tribes :p
Ruby is a cool language, with strong points (and weaknesses), but some of the examples are just “nice to have at times” features.
Just my two cents.
October 24th, 2006 at 6:18 am
Na, ezt is megértem hogy egy magyar ember commentolt a blogomon (bár a Gábor is magyar, de ő nem ér mert a haverom
No, you don’t have those, although I guess no one would use them even in the Hungarian version of Ruby
BTW what kind of measure is ‘tenyér’ (palm in English 
However, you can add them very easily:
class Fixnum
def tenyer
self77
end
def mazsa
self546
end
def kisujjesszemgolyo
self*1956
end
end
Yeah, yeah, without the diacritics, but after this you can write
5.tenyer + 12.mazsa + 7.kisujjesszemgolyo
Cool, isn’t it?
There is no compiler in Ruby. It’s an interpreted language.
The interpreter (obviously) knows nothing about semantics so why would it scream (given that the operator + is defined for all the types the 5.something calls return)
About the language issues - well, yes you are right. Nothing is perfect
October 24th, 2006 at 7:25 am
These examples are flawed. Sure the basic stuff is correct: no methods on primitives, no methods on arrays.
The problem with java isnt the language, its the developers who have no idea what they are doing. Look at the crap they produce, over and over again to solve the same problems, yet creating more.
Most of the examples you post from Classes onwards can be done very well in java, elegant even.
Some minor points: The Circle class is not equivalent by any stretch of the imagination, here is the equivalent java code:
class Circle {
Object coordinate;
Object radius;
}
Then, at runtime use reflection or byte code enhancement to add the getters/setters etc. That is now equivalent to the ruby code; ruby cant do this in your example:
refactor coordinate -> coord
The file example is stupid - you are pointing out problems with design, not the language. Any halfway decent library could provide a one liner to do this.
The tree example is worse: here is a “nicer” implementation.
tree = new Tree(”A”){{
add(new Tree(”b”){{
add(new Tree(”d”));
add(new Tree(”e”));
}};
add(new Tree(”c”){{
add(new Tree(”f”));
add(new Tree(”g”));
add(new Tree(”h”));
}}
}};
This is silly anyway: we would never create this structure (apart from in tests), but would load it from a database in a single method.
With varargs, it would be easy to do this:
tree = new Tree(”A”){{
add(new Tree(”b”){{
add(”d”, “e”);
}};
add(new Tree(”c”){{
add(”f”, “g”, “h”);
}}
}};
Which isnt bad, but still isnt as “nice”. But who cares: we never do this anyway!
Anyway: one last comment:
for( String s : Files.read(”test.txt”).scan(”(.*?\.)\s+?”) )
// process s
This is an excerpt from our Files library at work. While not as “one-linery” as ruby, it does the job with extra benefits.
Ruby has BETTER programmers in general, because it is more obscure, exactly as paul said.
You wait for the boatload of rubbish code that comes when the masses arrive at rails doorsteps.
By the way, we deployed 5 rails apps using apache, postgres and debian, had no end of troubles with maintainability (no lighty wouldnt have helped), — does no one else have the urge to rename or refactor?—, took rake deploy back to java + gwt and never looked back.
Lovely language, but is a toy when wanting to scale manpower. Small teams who dont have to maintain code: AWESOME! Pity the customer next year though, or the poor sod having to refactor the test cases (ouch!!!).
Ben.
October 24th, 2006 at 7:29 am
“No, you don’t have those, although I guess no one would use them even in the Hungarian version of Ruby”
My point: eye candy / nice to have
“However, you can add them very easily:”
I don’t know if I am comfortable with the idea of one billion different number classes.
“Cool, isn’t it?”
Yes, like extreme rafting. It’s cool, scary and dangerous.
/One thing I don’t like in Ruby is that you never know who “extended” your class, and you can easily end up with two operations of the same name but different behaviours. Then good luck with debugging.
“About the language issues - well, yes you are right. Nothing is perfect”
That’s why I said that these are a bit of “peasant blinding”
Useful, but I don’t see it as too relevant.
Nonetheless, yes, Ruby examples are easier to read. That’s true, and it is a nice language.
“BTW what kind of measure is ‘tenyér’ “
Like “marok”. Height if I’m not mistaken
October 24th, 2006 at 7:58 am
This comparision always iritate me. It is true that Ruby has a lot of built in functions. But any even semi-compotent programmer would make methods to encapsulate functionality that they needed more than once. Have a lot built in functions does not make a language any more powerful than a language that allows you to write your own functions. I can make any hugely complex program into a one liner if I make a function that runs that program.
October 24th, 2006 at 10:13 am
@Kevin:
This way, COBOL or BASIC are equally powerful, eh?
Of course if you have time/power/ability to write everything and encapsulate everything and use cool external libraries and have the brightest programmers around then every language is cool.
Thus, Java power = COBOL power. Q.E.D.
October 24th, 2006 at 10:24 am
@Roland:
No pain, no gain. Sure the world was safer when people were bashing each other with clubs - but that does not mean nuclear ICBMs are not much more powerful. Of course they also cause much more damage, sometimes uncontrollable and devastating.
You can be sure, when I was a Java early adopter (yes, I was even a Java zealot once) I got LOT of bashing from C and C++ fanboys that went like this:
Java is a toy. It’s for children under 6 years of age who can not use malloc(). Real programmers use C++. Java is for stupid programmers who can not optimize and think so they leave everything to the JVM. And boy, it is slow like hell… And and
and …
I am not commited to ANY language. I have times when I like this or that, but when a more powerful (or interesting) language comes along I don’t have any problem for use it paralelly with my other programming languages.
October 24th, 2006 at 10:43 am
@Roland:
Umm, you maybe forgot that english is estimated to be spoken by 0.5 to 2 BILLION people around the globe, whereas Hungarian by 15 million. So it is possibly that a language/package/framework which can do NLP ‘only’ in English is ‘pleasant blinding’ and irrelevant for you, however I guess the few hundred millions of English guys are fine using it…
October 24th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
“I am not commited to ANY language.”"”
Sensible. Each has its forte
“Umm, you maybe forgot that english is estimated to be spoken by 0.5 to 2 BILLION people around the globe”
That was not my point. I just noted that I would not base the use of a program language on whether I can type 2.megabyte or I would use some other methods (like create a constant int MEGABYTE=1024).
That’s all I wanted to say
Never met any programs where I needed 2.megabyte - though I can imagine a few places where it would be usefule - but I would have been glad to have 2.euro.convert.usd or something like that, ’cause I worked with financial programs.
“Umm, you maybe forgot that english is estimated to be spoken by 0.5 to 2 BILLION people around the globe, whereas Hungarian by 15 million.”
That’s why I asked about danish, sweden and such. The other 4 billion people around the globe
I was not promoting hungarian, it was just an easy example for obvious reasons.
So, the promotion of a programming language with a - in my opinion of course - nice, but only marginally useful feature was what I picked on.
October 24th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
“No pain, no gain. Sure the world was safer when people were bashing each other with clubs - but that does not mean nuclear ICBMs are not much more powerful. Of course they also cause much more damage, sometimes uncontrollable and devastating.”
I don’t know. Really. I mean, you can have a class definition spread over god knows how many files, half of them forgotten somewhere, 5 of the eight programmers who started the code base have gone to greener pastures, the documentation is almost nonexistent, and yes, maybe we had something like this, but where is it, and why, and, hey let’s write it anyway.
“You can be sure, when I was a Java early adopter (yes, I was even a Java zealot once) I got LOT of bashing from C and C++ fanboys that went like this:”
I know the feeling.
“when a more powerful (or interesting) language comes along I don’t have any problem for use it”
I don’t doubt it. And I never said Ruby is worse or better than Java.
Actually, I did not judge either language. Just said that some of your examples were not convincing for me as being so important features.
Ruby is cool. I like it. Java is cool. I like it. Never coded in either of them in a 9-5 job. So, I don’t consider myself as someone who could pass judgement
Delphi is. Good. With that I have work experience and I have a solid opinion about that. But that’s irrelevant
October 24th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Roland makes a good point regarding the eye candy.
In APL, we simply write:
1024 102 24 10
where is a single character primitive function that looks like an up tack (also known as the “base value” function.)
Regardless of whether or not you use a character or a word, the point is that a well-defined, small set of primitive functions is much more powerful than a zillion specific methods.
For example, if I want to see what 1 0 1 is in base 2, I use the same function:
2 1 0 1
Less is definitely more!
I would have assumed Ruby had a base value method on its array class that would be similar to the APL base balue primitive. I guess you can always write your own.
October 24th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Woops,
I used brackets and it got lost in the translation. Here is is again:
Roland makes a good point regarding the eye candy.
In APL, we simply write:
1024 {decode} 102 24 10
where {decode} is a single character primitive function that looks like an up tack (also known as the “base value” function.)
Regardless of whether or not you use a character or a word, the point is that a well-defined, small set of primitive functions is much more powerful than a zillion specific methods.
For example, if I want to see what 1 0 1 is in base 2, I use the same function:
2 {decode} 1 0 1
Less is definitely more!
I would have assumed Ruby had a base value method on its array class that would be similar to the APL base balue primitive. I guess you can always write your own.
October 24th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
About handling Dates and Calendaring stuff, could you elaborate:
- how does Ruby know that some parts of the globe have weeks starting on Monday, vs parts where weeks start on Sunday?
- does it carry translations for days of week and names of months for all languages localization of which is supported (30 to 50, maybe more?)
- is Ruby aware of daylight savings? How many time zones is it aware of? what will be the result of 20.minutes.ago if now is 3:01 a.m. PST on Sunday after 3rd Saturday in October in US?
An example of doing that would be nice to have…
October 24th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
and I can describe your article with just one word: BULLSHIT
October 25th, 2006 at 12:31 am
Ruby isnt an ICBM. Lets leave the “fanfic” for another language that makes things simpler, more maintainable, faster, more scalable (cores + machines), more readable, and solves all the existing problems with one easy strike.
Its more like a shotgun vs a pistol in accuracy - not as pronounced.
October 25th, 2006 at 1:22 am
@arno nymous:
well, but at least the message came through: succinctness is power
October 25th, 2006 at 6:02 am
Look kids, many Java developer’s will agree with you - Ruby+RoR are Great! And one day, when you grow up, get a real job, and need to solve real world business problems - ie, do more than write poxy haxx0r scripts and pretty little web 2.0 sites, you too may realize that little things like vendor support, a decent IDE, and any other number of things that Java has over Ruby are more important than silly little “10.times { }” examples.
Now, off to bed, it’s past yer bedtime.
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November 16th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
Though it’s already been menetioned I’ll just reiterate. If you drop the Groovy-all.jar (roughyl 1.5MB last I checked) in your classpath then you can practically match feature for feature from Ruby. You’ll also have additional features that wouldn’t exist in the Ruby equivalents, native Java integration, the ability to drop into any popular App server, and no impedence mismatch talking to existing legacy Java code as what would exist in JRuby.
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May 23rd, 2007 at 6:23 am
Probably you dont like java. Many of this java examples i can write faster.
May 23rd, 2007 at 7:09 am
That’s not the point. Of course they can be written faster (also the Ruby ones can be shortened - I have seen a 150 Byte long FizBuzz implementation in Ruby) - however, it will still be much longer than the Ruby version (mainly if you make the Ruby ones shorter, too). The real point is, however, the readability stemming from the succinctness - which you can not achieve in Java, no matter what you do. (Ok, ok, you can use groovy or JRuby but I mean pure Java)
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:58 pm
You have a typo in your post. This:
102.megabytes + 24.kbytes + 10.bytes
should be this:
102.megabytes + 24.kilobytes + 10.bytes
July 20th, 2007 at 2:37 am
Thanks, Trevor! Fixed.
August 31st, 2007 at 6:05 am
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September 25th, 2007 at 4:45 am
Is Ruby dead?
I haven’t once seen it being used to create a large, enterprise level web application employing transparent persistence built using a thing that all the interpreted language people like to live in denial of: ARCHITECTURE
If you engineer enterprise level software for a living rather that obsess about manipulating the contents of text files or printing out the same string 10 x times in the least number of key presses then you’re most likely a fellow Java developer and I’d like to say congratulations. Keep up the good work. I’m sure this page was an interesting diversion but it’s time to get back to earning $100/hr providing your boss with the value and productivity he has come to know and expect from you as a professional Java software engineer.
October 8th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Instead of this
Util.megaBytes(102) + Util.kiloBytes(24) + Util.bytes(10)
you can use static imports (Java 5 required)
import static package.ByteUnitsUtil.*
….
megaBytes(102) + kiloBytes(24) + bytes(10)
….
Not as clean as the Ruby one but at least cleaner than your Java example
November 5th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
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