Example of the difference between Ruby and Java

Having worked extensively with both ruby and java, I thought I'd share some interesting differences between how one can approach solving problems in the two languages.

Let's take a common example of a function that will take a variable number of arguments and return a string with all non-null values separated by commas. We'll start by just using the core runtime and see what we can do.

Here's the Java example:

public class StringJava {
    public static void main(String[] args){
        System.out.println(printComma("test1","test2","Test3"));
        System.out.println(printComma("test1",null,"Test3","Test4"));
    }
    public static String printComma(String... names) {
        StringBuffer buff = new StringBuffer();
        boolean first = true;
        for (String str: names) {
            if (str != null) {
               if (first) {
                   buff.append(str);
                   first = false;
               } else {
                   buff.append(','+str);
               }
            }
        }
        return buff.toString();
    }
}

Now the equivalent in Ruby:

def print_comma(*data)
  data.compact.join(',')
end
puts print_comma "Test1","Test2","Test3"
puts print_comma "Test1",nil,"Test3","Test4"

Ouch! It actually gets much better, because if you really need this sort of functionality a lot,you could just add the method directly to the Array class and do this in ruby:

class Array
  def comma_join
    self.compact.join(',')
  end
end

puts ["Test1","Test2","Test3"].comma_join
puts ["Test1",nil,"Test3","Test4"].comma_join

The latter approach would simply be impossible in java, but with just a little extra effort, allows you to enhance your ruby Array class to give you some very useful functionality.

At it's core, ruby is geared toward rapidly producing compact code and enables developers to modify their environment to support just about anything they want to do. Java, on the other hand, is geared more toward following a lowest common denominator standard at the expense of being more verbose and not allow developers to expand the language to meet their needs.

I'm not suggesting ruby is superior in all cases, but from a flexibility and development effort perspective, there really isn't any fair comparison, ruby trounces java in almost every respect.