Today I finished the Number guessing game

During the early part of the code, my mind started thinking “How will comparing string input from the user, work with a number? 🤔” (💪 of having gone through such issues numerous times over the years)

Of course, it was explained later.

I was a bit disappointed that the code paniced upon entering non-number 😞 especially after the expect clause.

Turns out that is expected behaviour.

In this new year, I have decided to learn rust

All my recent experience has been in dynamic languages (90% python, 10% ruby)

But I started my software development career in C, and did that for probably 10 years. So I’m not new to compiled languages.¹ But things have changed a lot (for the better) in these years.

Additionally, rust is getting a lot of attention from bigwigs like MS.

Several years ago, I came across a quote¹ about how learning python via Django. The author said that if you don’t properly know python, you may not understand what is Django specific and what is not.

FWIW, even after working with python, I never used Django in any of my main project. But I did learn python first before the frameworks.

Fast forward to few days ago. I am working on Ruby code to read from Azure Service Bus.

Ameba seems like quite mature linter for Crystal language. As I start my first real world code in Crystal language, the real tools are very useful. (Side note: I didn’t write any non-real-world crystal code. I’m not sure it helps. REPL sessions are not code. they don’t count)

It automatically uses built-in formatter in the --fix mode.

There is also awesome emacs integration as well. Check ameba.el

Today I learned about Bang methods in Ruby.

Methods ending with ! are potentially dangerous, because they update the object they operate on.

➜  irb --sample-book-mode
>> name = "sample_string"
=> "sample_string"
>> name.reverse
=> "gnirts_elpmas"
>> name
=> "sample_string"
>> name.reverse!
=> "gnirts_elpmas"
>> name
=> "gnirts_elpmas"

As we can see above, reverse! modified name itself. Most times (?) we don’t want that. But sometimes we do.

Knowing that ! method will change the object, allows us to choose the correct version.

Continuing with my Ruby language learning journey, I wanted to use it for more than Hello world.

So I decided to try python’s request equivalent.

Since I didn’t know where to begin, I just searched for requests on RubyGems

Turns out Gem by the exact name exists and with description Because Requests for Python is awesome 🤗 But it isn’t updated in close to 5 years now.

I also wanted to use something native (i.e. not ported from other languages - although nothing wrong with that)

While there are multiple ways to use Ruby debugger, for my first Ruby script (?) I found starting the script via rdbg to be the easiest.

Like rdbg myscript.rb

Debugger has all the basic command I have used elsewhere.

• n for next
• pp for pretty print
• q for quit

For subsequent times, using require 'debug' followed by binding.break may be better.

This README has all the details.

If I were to explain bundler to pythonista (like myself) I would say

Bundler in Ruby land is like poetry in python land, except it does not create sandbox environment

To explain it a little more. It tracks dependencies in a Gemfile (and Gemfile.lock) which then goes in your repo. Other engineers sharing your code would then run bundle install, and they get exact same Gems (including versions) on their machines.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m trying Lunar nvim starter kit. Latest version of nvim comes with LSP support, and while learning a new language LSP could be really helpful (I think)

I had heard of solargraph. Running :LspInstall in nvim gave me option of sorbet as well. But I decided to stick with solargraph.

nvim was successful in installing solargraph, or so it told me. But it did not work. LspInfo told me that it did not find solargraph Just to be sure I gem install solargraph from the terminal, before I tried to install LSP from nvim again

Start clean

I created an alias irb=irb --sample-book-mode

This removes the complex prompt like irb(main):001:0> and gives plain and simple >> instead.

Get Help!

When programming in Python, even today I use dir in Python REPL. So I was looking for the equivalent in Ruby land.

Turns out I was comparing apples and oranges (so to speak)

As of early 2022, irb has awesome help built-in. It has good autocompletion. So just typing . may be enough to know list of methods available.