Mixing in some additional fun

I don’t know Ruby extremely well, but I get it. It’s really fun to learn, and I often find additional pleasure from trying to “out do” my previous code. Ruby gives you that luxury. There are so many ways to do the same thing. I know I don’t use the best methods, and so I like figuring out new, more efficient one’s.

For instance, when collecting my del.icio.us bookmarks I used to do an overzealous loop, authenticating and parsing xml using REXML (even keeping track of indexes for the arrays!). I knew this wasn’t the best way to do it, but I was learning and it worked. Now, I collect the bookmarks via one line:

bookmarks = r.recent('tag-name',per_page).sort_by {|post| post['time']}

Then I do a .reverse loop to get the list in reverse chronological order. The first method required 25 lines. The second method required 7 lines. Anyway, there’s still so much to learn. That is definitely a language I enjoy playing around with.

Oh, yeah. At work I’m doing C# until January. Here is one more example/reason why I can’t wait to get back to RoR: Ruby vs. C#. Which would you rather do? It’s things like this that make it hard to switch and try out something else.