Comment by stonecharioteer
Comment by stonecharioteer 4 days ago
I've been very taken by Ruby and how it uses blocks everywhere! This is an article I wrote just to emphasize that.
Comment by stonecharioteer 4 days ago
I've been very taken by Ruby and how it uses blocks everywhere! This is an article I wrote just to emphasize that.
An interesting thing about Smalltalk and Ruby blocks is that they aren't just anonymous functions/lambdas, right? i.e. if you 'return' / '^' in a block, it's the context around the block that you return from, not just the block itself? That's what struck me about both of them when I was used to thinking in basic Lisp terms.
As much as I love Ruby (and I love it a lot - I right now have Claude fix eigenclass compilation issues in another window in my long-languishing Ruby compiler hobby project), this is also the root of a lot of confusion.
Ruby has two types of closures: lambda's, where return returns to the caller, and proc's/blocks where return acts as a return in the defining scope.
Beginners often struggle with the distinction between lambda and block, and often will be wildly confused if they ever see "proc" in the wild.
Yet lambda and proc both return a Proc object, and if you take the value of a block, you also get a Proc object... Just with different return semantics...
It'd be nice if this was a bit clearer.
My next post, which is on loops, is about the common stuff with smalltalk as well!
I discovered Ruby (through Rails) about twenty years ago on the dot. Coming from Perl and PHP it took me a while, but I remember the moment when I had the same realisation you did.
I still love this language to bits, and it was fun to relive that moment vicariously through someone elses eyes. Thanks for writing it up!
I'm glad folks are having fun reading this. I want to write a few more articles, particularly dissecting the internals of Ruby and how amazing it feels.
Have a look at Smalltalk blocks, or FP languages, to see where Ruby's inspiration comes from.