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Comment by phaedryx | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking forward to this series. I feel like I'm getting "grumpy old man" syndrome with Ruby. I've been using Ruby for long time and I feel like a lot of the changes we get now are more "wouldn't it be cool if..." instead of "this is a really solid, useful addition" changes

That said, I do really like how Elixir does some things.

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Elixir does a great job with pattern matching. When I first heard that ruby was introducing pattern matching, I was super excited and hoped it might be a subset of what elixir can do. I was disappointed with what ruby shipped.

Same. I love Ruby so much but after doing so much in Elixir, the lack of elixir-style pattern matching and a pipe operator are so painful. Ruby is still a wonderful language and one of my favorites, but these were major missed opportunities. I got the impression that they wanted something different than what other langs have done, and I think it's great to consider alternative suggestions but it crossed the line a bit into NIH syndrome IMHO and I think we're worse off for it. Either that or the decision makers didn't really understand the point/purpose of it, but that feels unlikely to me.

I think we now have an, “I worked on a Ruby implementation,” support group at work.

I know Java evolves quite slowly, and people complain about it, but I really respect the thought that goes into new Java features.

I really cant say i agree here. Ruby has fantastic pattern matching, and is simplifies so much code. I do work for shopify (but unfortunately not on the rails or ruby teams) so maybe a lot of these changes just jive with our culture and company. But why would you not want pattern matching? Ive seen it make pretty huge complicates pieces of code significantly simpler.

I might also have the "grumpy old man" syndrome, but I'm with you here. But it's not entirely unusual for the languagr. Despite Ruby being great for object oriented programming, it has a lot of features to allow for more functional approaches and other general coding styles. I'm not a fan of it, but if it makes someone happy, good for them. Ruby is meant to be the happy engineering language, so it's all on point. But I'd ask people from refraining from posting these new approaches as the "right way" to do things, as people are apt to do.

What's your opinion on one line method definitions (edit: just learned that those are called endless methods) and numbered block parameters?

Grumpy. I don't use them, it's another thing I have to remember, and it makes the parser more complicated.

At long last.

> I feel like a lot of the changes we get now are more "wouldn't it be cool if..."

I mean.....that is the ethos of Ruby from day 1, is it not?

I should be more clear. I'm talking about pursuing novelty for the sake of novelty.

"wouldn't it be funny if..."

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