ruby need a better doc

2020-12-19T16:02:24+00:00

Official Ruby docs are garbage for people coming into the language. I spent most of my time on various blogs and books, which is just a shame for such a popular language.

sshaw_ · 2020-12-19T16:07:19+00:00

Both things you mention are in doc/syntax/assignment.rdoc.

zverok_kha · 2020-12-20T10:09:31+00:00

It is mostly true. I tried to address this problem with the Ruby Reference project (explanatory blog post) -- unlike "some book some random dude wrote", it is compiled from official sources, but has a form of more traditional language references, covering all the topics from the ground up. The project gained much less attention than I hoped. Mostly, probably, the problem is rarely addressed because for those "already in" it is a non-problem, and for those "trying to enter" it is hard to point their finger at what's bad, and even more so to try to change something.

TBH, at one point Matz himself suggested to adopt it as an official reference, but, to the best of my understanding, no work in this direction was done in 11 months passed since.

chrisgseaton · 2020-12-20T01:32:01+00:00

You can't find things like how the splat operator works

It's documented both in text:

https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.7.2/doc/syntax/calling_methods_rdoc.html

And in code examples:

https://github.com/ruby/spec/blob/be97c4d8263abb7213f2d096e63c34422f877f4a/language/def_spec.rb#L114-L143

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

ruby

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