Toby's journal

This is a rather geeky rant, about Ruby. You may want to skip over it.

I can fully understand the being sick of Perl; some days it really gets me down. I just don't see what the "big deal" is with Ruby, which comes across to me more as a novelty than genuinely useful (like so many Perl modules :) ).

I don't really understand their thoughts behind trying to put every feature they can think of in each class.. Case in point, the string class: http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ref_c_string.html

How did they pick that set of operations you can perform?
What on earth is the squeeze method useful for?
Why would you use the replace method and not just some kind of assignment or copy operator?
Why include something like crypt, but not other hashing functions? Come on, lets introduce the entire gamut of SHA-related functions too :) Why not some actual two-way cryptographic functions as while we're there as well?

I guess the point I'm making is that it feels like their design philosophy is not so much feature-creep, as feature-mad-rush.

But some people seem to like it, so maybe I should just go back to coding in assembly or something.