mike.mainguy

I posted a while back about how ruby's syntax is better for designing software than java because it removes extra language cruft and enables developers to write more succinct and direct code. A common response to this from detractors is that "it's only three extra characters" and "my IDE can automatically generate that code for me". Sitting at the train station today reading a comment from someone that said something similar to "geeze, if you've got thousands of lines of code, why do you care about a couple of letters and a parenthesis or curly brace here and there?". I started thinking about why I care and discovered the reason: With those little three letters here and there, your code literally becomes a type of Gibberish In gibberish, you use simple rules to add extra characters here and there (sounds familiar) to create and quite confusing language that is a 1 for 1 direct translation to/from english. While gibberish, pig latin, an...

As a long time java developer and ... well ... at this point also a long time ruby developer, I've found some things about the ruby language are much less bothersome than in java. Groovy takes an interesting middle road, but only gets about halfway in my mind. I'll leave the runtime differences and the dynamic/static compiled/interpreted debates for other forums and just focus on the Focus on this one irksome quirk. Property Accessors are too verbose Java Definition class Car { private Color color; public Color getColor() { return color; } public void setColor(Color color) { this.color = color; } } and to use it: Car car = new Car(); Color blue = car.getColor(); car.setColor(blue); The whole getter setter thing is a pain to me. The bean pattern used by java is just overly verbose. For all the OO purists, I get it, we need to hide the private variables and put them behind methods to abstract away the inner structure, but I'm so...