One thing that really bothers me about ruby is its use of cryptic variables such as $: and $?. For example:
$: << "/some/path"
I find this version much better:
$LOAD_PATH << "/some/path"
I vastly prefer the verbose version for its clarity. In addition, an unfamiliar user cannot search $: in google.
The standard Ruby distribution provides a library called English which maps many of these variables to useful names. I think this should be the default, however, and not require an external library (which is not part of core). I also think the cryptic versions should be deprecated and eventually removed to encourage the use of the verbose names.
One Response to “Ruby’s frustrating use of cryptic variables”
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I couldn’t agree with you more about including English into the standard library (although what to do about French.rb, Spanish.rb and the natural ruby juggernaut Japanese.rb.
After six months on Rails I find that I still have no idea of the differences between $’ and $` and a poor font might make it even harder to distinguish.
That said for historical reasons I am not against keeping the $’ $` cryptic versions. The globals are language agnostic .
And lastly let’s not that Ruby is a scripting language and may need to compete in some cryptic code competition with a perl module.