I’d be taken by surprise if I were told by someone that their favourite programming language is one that they’d never written more than a few lines of code in, but that’s my situation right now. Due to a number of unrelated circumstances, I’ve been unable to install and use Ruby, but I’ve been reading a book I obtained recently – Eloquent Ruby, by Russ Olsen – which I’ve found to be a fantastic read. I’m currently about halfway through, and am almost certainly going to pick up some other books in the series – Design Patterns in Ruby, also by Russ, Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby, and, (though this isn’t in the same series of books), when it’s released, Agile Web Development in Rails 5.

So far, I’ve learnt that Ruby seems to be exactly how I want a programming language to be – very consistent, intuitive, expressive, and clean. As a short history, I began programming in Lua. At the time, I was pretty young – either eight or nine – and didn’t quite grasp the fundamentals of how a programming language is written. I could write code, but it was a short while before I realised that essentially everything was an expression, which could be nested and used in funky ways – meaning I could write lines like (Not that I’m advocating this style, of course)

tab[index + 3] = get_variable(get_function()({ [“a”] = 5}));

Or to realise that the functions provided to me by my environment (At the time, Roblox), such as their event system, where you’d subscribe a listener in a manner similar to:

object.event:connect(function() … code … end);

Were often something I could manufacture myself, by making a table (Vaguely similar to a hash and an array butchered and stitched together), with a function called “connect” that accepts a function as it’s parameter. These kinds of complex nested expressions and the use of closures and anonymous functions hadn’t really made much of an impression on me, and the higher-level constructs I was using merely felt like a black magic that just worked. Once I realised this, I gradually drifted to feeling like Lua wasn’t ideal for many things – both in terms of speed, and a limited syntax (allowing for some incredible OO systems such as MiddleClass, but still falling short of true OO languages).

I then transitioned to writing object oriented code with C# and Java, languages that, of course, have methods coupled with data, so I could write code that kept functionality with it’s associated data; something that felt sensible and correct. I still wasn’t completely satisfied, though. While “everything” (for the most part) was an object, there were still things that I felt I should be able to do that I couldn’t. Primitives, for example, are essentially special cases, and although autoboxing is nice, it’s a bit clunky. While C# hides the detail better than Java (Array<int>, anyone?), it’s still got its own problems.

Another two languages I’ve used widely are PHP (boo!) and Python. With these, I loved how it was object oriented, but you could flexibly pass objects around. I still prefer static typing, and I do think it’s often more optimal for larger projects (if only so your editor can be a bit lot more intelligent; there’s sometimes type annotations, but they always seemed like a poor man’s static typing to me), but I think dynamic typing can, when used well, be a great convenience.

I had a placement this summer at Netcraft, an internet services company in Bath. It introduced me to Perl, a language which I’d heard about but never really been interested in – my first year of university was my first serious venture into the Unix world, and I’d spent most of that trying to hide from calculus and trigonometry, while trying to improve my ability with Haskell, a language we used in our first term.

At first, I really didn’t like Perl. I’m still not overly fussed, but it managed to persuade me and I ended up writing a few scripts in it at home. I find a few things about it rather annoying – it’s inconsistent, too many things have unexpected side effects or sets special variables, there’s too many ways of expressing the same idea, the object system is not just unintuitive, but feels completely hacked on (Though, in fairness, Moose fixes this, I disagree with the principle that you should have to use a library for something like this). I find it ridiculous that it took decades to add method signatures, and even now they’re considered experimental! I don’t like how I have to think for ages before I can even begin to get the length of an array in a data structure, and when I do, I end up producing code that looks a bit like this:

scalar @{$structure->[{[@@{$}->{a}->$@{ } ]]] ) }->{key}->[3]->{3}}

I jest, but this is certainly how it feels. Even if the speed of thinking comes with practice, it’s still a bit gross how many extra symbols I need to access children of arrayrefs and hashrefs, compared to other languages where you can just nest these kinds of structures effortlessly without thought. Even some of the dedicated Perl community seems to agree here – Perl 6 eliminates a lot of the variation in the symbols to make them at the very least more consistent.

But there are also a lot of things I love about it, and wish more other languages I use had: statement modifiers are a big one. For context, a statement modifier lets you suffix any statement with a little expression like:

print “hello” if should_print_hello;

For some reason, this seems infinitely more elegant than a faux statement modifier in C#, which would be:

if (should_print_hello) print “hello”;

Realistically, they’re similar, but the latter feels more bulky, doesn’t read as well, and I’m not particularly keen on if statements with omitted curly braces.

All that said, whenever I have a basic task to do, my first thought is “Hey, I could write a 10 line Perl script to do this!”. The Perl community isn’t lying when it says it makes the “easy things easy” – it really does. This is something I’ve heard almost unanimously from all of my intern colleagues; most of us seem to harbour some level of disdain for Perl, but still want to use it a lot, because it’s just that damn easy. It’s like an infection that grows on you, presumably eventually turning you into a fully fledged Perl monk before you go to live in a monastery and dedicate your life to answering questions on http://perlmonks.org/.

Ruby is a language I’ve wanted to learn ever since I got pretty good at Lua and decided to move to greener pastures. It was for a completely superficial reason: I thought it’s website was really well designed. Looking at http://lua.org/ and comparing it to http://ruby-lang.org/, you can probably see why I thought this.

For some reason, I slowly became under the impression that I didn’t like the look of Ruby, despite never taking a decent look, and avoided it. Until I decided to learn a new thing, and made it Ruby, after seeing a colleague writing some Rails code.

Soon after looking into it, I realised something: Ruby seemed to be just as good a language for writing quick scripts to solve problems as Perl, a trivially superior one for web development thanks to Rails and Sinatra, and seemed to take all the nice features, like statement modifiers, but wrap it in with a very consistent object oriented approach, where literally everything behaves like an object. “hello”.upcase? Well, “HELLO”, of course – no syntax errors to be found here!

I love the loop structures, and how enumerating is handled so elegantly. I love how there’s a culture of writing DSLs (Though the term is used very loosely) to do all sorts of things, from testing, to make tools. Everything I’ve read about the language makes me itch to rewrite all of my code-bases in it, but I think I’ll just settle for using it for personal systems administration and future website development.

No doubt this is just some kind of initial language infatuation, and it may pass, but right now, Ruby is my favourite language, and I’ve yet to even use it properly.