In class on Wednesday
Venkat explained so well,
yet so succinctly, what I'm loving so much about Ruby: the signal to noise ratio is higher
in Ruby than in most languages.
One of his examples was to take a program that does absolutely nothing in Java:
public class DoNothing
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
}
}
And compare it to this one in Ruby:
Notice the difference?
Incidentally, the high signal to noise ratio is also what I like so much about Coldfusion. To run a query, you just
do it. You don't have to go through the hassle of creating connections, statements, and the like. Just type
in your query and go. Of course the drawback in Coldfusion is that in many cases, there is a lot of noise.
For example, to create an object I have to write
<cfset someObj = createObject("component", "long.Path.To.CFC")>,
and let's not mention the tag syntax (at least I can use
<cfscript>, though I rarely do).
In any case, I find Java's database access so hard to work with, the last time I used it in any significant context I
created a façade to do all the work for me. I'd just create an object of it, and pass in a query to run.
But, there's also a problem with building the queries in languages like Java and C#:
String theQueryString="select columnName from table" +
" where someColumn = " + someValue +
" and anotherColumn = " + anotherValue + " ... " +
" order by " + orderBy;
Horrible! For long queries, that can get extremely unreadable. In Coldfusion if you need to create
a multi-line string to keep it readable, you can simply do the following:
<cfsavecontent variable="theQueryString">
put any text you want in here
and as many lines as you
want
</cfsavecontent>
And I was happy to find out you can do something similar in Ruby:
someVariable = <<DELIMITER_FOR_WHEN_YOUR_STRING_IS_DONE
put any text you want in here
and as many lines as you
want
DELIMITER_FOR_WHEN_YOUR_STRING_IS_DONE
The next great surprise from Ruby? You can add methods to a class at run-time (there is no compilation)
quite easily. Suppose I wanted the absolute value method to work on a string. I could just do:
class String
def abs
"absolute value of string"
end
end
And no, it didn't overwrite the String class. So far, I am amazed. I know you can
do the same thing in Coldfusion, but that doesn't make it any less awesome.
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Leave a comment
one thing: the way you wrote the java sql stuff is indeed horrible, however this is not the way it is currently done these days - you just put some question marks instead of the string concatenation you just did, then work through prepared statement etc and you are done - and the framework does the encoding for you and everthing works smooth - really, the direct db access is not the place where ruby is way better than java; gotta admit there are others, but not this one...
Posted by Daniel
on Dec 08, 2007 at 04:32 PM UTC - 5 hrs
That is quite true, however there are other uses for multiline strings as well - one is that if you have some text you need to process on you can just paste it in the file - no need to read it in from another file or break it into chunks.
You are right though - good catch. Keep me honest =)
Posted by
Sammy Larbi
on Dec 10, 2007 at 10:39 AM UTC - 5 hrs
