DABlog

Chad Fowler wrote an interesting article this week on the subject of Great Ruby Code. The article concludes with an invitation for comment:

Anyway, I still don’t have a satisfactory list of great Ruby code. I’d like to build such a list. So, please leave a comment saying the name of an open source Ruby project you feel represents truly great Ruby code.

My comments are somewhat “meta”, and I had an interesting chat with Chad about the whole topic of greatness in Ruby code after I’d read the article, so I thought I’d make my comments here in an article of my own.

For me, the very concept of great Ruby code contains the seeds of its own destruction. Here’s why.

When I see Ruby code and think, “This is great,” what I usually mean, at least as a first approximation, is that Ruby is great. I don’t mean that everything written in Ruby is automatically great. But I do find that a lot of what’s involved in writing what I consider beautiful Ruby code is getting out of Ruby’s way. Ruby is famous for getting out of your way; but you can and should return the favor.

I’m slipping between “great” and “beautiful,” which isn’t fair but maybe that’s part of the problem: I’m not sure what pure greatness in Ruby code would be, because I tend to perceive Ruby code in terms of beauty—not down to the millihelen,[1] perhaps, but as an overall matter—rather than greatness; and I can’t really give an individual programmer “credit,” so to speak, for the beauty I find in, say, yield or class << object or the technically unnecessary but, in my view, manifestly elegant class/module distinction.

Then there’s the subjectivity issue (as many of you non-fans of class << object are probably thinking right about now!). Of course Chad isn’t anticipating universal agreement on what’s great in Ruby code. But for me, the impossibility of consensus is another seed of the very concept’s own destruction. It’s an irony, even a paradox: if there is such a thing as greatness in Ruby code, we’ll never find it because once we shift the discussion to the plane of “What do you consider great?”, it’s likely to unravel in the same way that discussions about what’s great in any art unravel.

And about that art thing: Coding is of course an art, but it’s a peculiar one in that the artist is operating within the boundaries set by another artist&mash;namely, the designer of the language. (Note that I said coding, not programming. I’m not trying to drive a wedge between them, but as Knuth and others have shown us, there are aspects to the art of computer programming that are not about this or that language, and I’d like to keep the terminology at least a bit separate.) Is it like music? Are we interpreting Matz’s score? Or is Matz the playwright, we the actors? Or perhaps Matz is like whoever invented baseball: a set of rules within which we elect to operate. Well, there are great baseball players….

Maybe greatness in Ruby is ours to lose: If you follow stylistic best practices (which is another, but in my view related, matter), and above all let the language talk to you and don’t “write {Java,C,Perl,...} in Ruby,” your code will be great, or beautiful if you prefer, because you’ve collaborated successfully with Ruby. And yes, I do think that Ruby confers an advantage here over many other languages. For me, the most important key to Ruby’s beauty and its greatness is that Ruby code gets clearer, rather than more cryptic, as it gets shorter. I don’t want to jump through the hoop of reciting all the obvious facts (that this can be true in other languages; that Ruby code can be cryptic; etc.). I present it for what it is: my take on the magic of Ruby. I’ve always said that as you work on a Ruby program, code disappears from your screen. So it does—and the program becomes more, rather than less, expressive and communicative.

There’s no tidy stopping point to this exploration, and that’s as it should be. I encourage you to go to Chad’s article and read it and respond. I don’t expect us to end up with a definitive list of great Ruby code. But what Chad is doing is inviting us to look—really look—and I find it well worth the trouble.

[1] A millihelen is the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. (I wish I could take credit for that one but I only know it as an old joke.)