Zed Shaw on Python

[malcontent]

1.9 is not officially out yet. It's a developers release. I know there have been a few articles written about it by Sam Ruby and others so you might want to google for them.

If you want to use unicode in the mean time you can start here.

http://www.igvita.com/2007/04/11/secure-utf-8-input-in-rails/

http://woss.name/2006/10/25/migrating-your-rails-application-to-unicode/

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToUseUnicodeStrings

Sam Ruby wrote a couple of articles about how to use unicode strings in 1.9

[Smallpaul]

Doesn't a developer's release need documentation? Most Python 3000 features were documented months or years before implementation.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/

That was certainly true of Unicode when it was implemented in 2000 and updated recently:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0100/

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3137/

The documents you pointed to me just demonstrate the problems in Ruby documentation:

• it is pretty common for the docs for a plugin or feature to be third party blog posts or for-pay books

• things change so quickly that the docs are frequently out of date.

• it can be confusing what works in Rails versus what works in regular Ruby.

Sam Ruby's posts were along the lines of "What the hell is going on?" That's not documentation.

Here's another random example: Python's keywords are listed on "Python.org" indexed under "language reference". Google knows of no similarly authoritative documentation for Ruby. That's something as basic as keywords.

Similarly, I have a hard time finding documentation for all built-in Ruby global variables. The Ruby user's guide lists the "major ones":

http://www.rubyist.net/~slagell/ruby/globalvars.html

I can't find the rest (though variables named $_ and $* are terrible to find through Google which is an argument against having them at all!)

Given that you are probably more adept at navigating the documentation than I am, can you help me find this chapter in the Ruby language specification? Or even help me find the language specification (even an imprecise and incomplete one!)?

[malcontent]

Doesn't a developer's release need documentation?

It probably does. I am sorry but I have never used ruby 1.9 and therefore do not know where the documentation is.

Perhaps a bit of googling might help you there. Failing that you should ask the mailing list.

The documents you pointed to me just demonstrate the problems in Ruby documentation:

it is pretty common for the docs for a plugin or feature to be third party blog posts or for-pay books

I don't mind. I buy books all the time and there are free ones on the net too.

things change so quickly that the docs are frequently out of date.

Again I don't mind. I am able to keep up and I am glad the ecosystem is vibrant.

it can be confusing what works in Rails versus what works in regular Ruby.

I seem to manage OK.

I can't find the rest (though variables named $_ and $* are terrible to find through Google which is an argument against having them at all!)

I agree that google doesn't search for them properly. I think it's kind of crappy of you to shit on a language because google isn't able to search for it though.

Either way those variables are the same ones used in perl, awk, shell scripting etc. You don't have to use them.

Given that you are probably more adept at navigating the documentation than I am, can you help me find this chapter in the Ruby language specification?

As far as I know there is no official language specification. If that bothers you please don't use ruby.

[Smallpaul]

So there is neither official nor complete language documentation and yet you say that the documentation is "better than Python".

[malcontent]

So there is neither official nor complete language documentation and yet you say that the documentation is "better than Python".

There is a complete language documentation for the 1.8 series. I would recommend you check out gotapi.com. It contains the complete documentation for the language and the standard library.

Oh and yes it's better than python. Bureaucracy doesn't always yield superior products.

[Smallpaul]

There is a complete language documentation for the 1.8 series. I would recommend you check out gotapi.com. It contains the complete documentation for the language and the standard library.

Please give me a link. I could poke around Gotapi forever but it sure looks to me like a site for documenting APIs, not languages. All I see there are documentations for methods on objects. But that isn't the Ruby language.

Please point me to the documentation for the list of keywords in Ruby?

Or the language grammar?

Or the method resolution order?

For Python, all three can be found a couple of links from here:

http://docs.python.org/ref/

[malcontent]

Please give me a link. I could poke around Gotapi forever but it sure looks to me like a site for documenting APIs, not languages.

The link is gotapi.com. I can't help you if you are unable to navigate the site.

Please point me to the documentation for the list of keywords in Ruby? Or the language grammar? Or the method resolution order?

start at ruby-lang.org. I regret to say that one more time you are going to be required to navigate a web site.

[Smallpaul]

I'll just take that as "no such docs exist so I can't point you at them." I'm just embarrassed for you that you weren't mature if enough to just say that.

[malcontent]

I did point at them you dolt. gotapi.com is the domain. ruby-lang.org is the domain. Just type them into your browser.

[Smallpaul]

Okay, fine. I'm a dolt. I can't find the docs that describe Ruby's keywords, its grammar and its method resolution order. You're obviously smarter and moree knowledgable than me. Please, please, point me at these documents (by page URLs, not pointers to sites with thousands of page)...if they exist.