Ruby Syntax Quirks

Discussions center on Ruby's flexible, surprising, and sometimes confusing syntax, idioms, features, and behaviors, including debates on whether they are elegant or problematic.

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e.g Person.find logger.log GC IMO HN Proc.new Kernel.send Foo.new x.call ruby proc class puts hash nil code atom def lambda

Sample Comments

chatman Mar 13, 2015 View on HN

Just comes to show how careless Ruby guys were while building this.

sn41 Dec 2, 2022 View on HN

Ruby has this. Can be surprising to read code ... "Wait.. What? Oh ok."

optimuspaul May 19, 2017 View on HN

yeah, ruby allows some odd stuff for sure.

breatheoften May 2, 2020 View on HN

does ruby do anything like this? i'm new to ruby and could imagine something like this biting me ...

ludamad May 9, 2014 View on HN

It's fine, Ruby takes the more sensible semantics here (IMO)

rbanffy Feb 3, 2010 View on HN

Ruby always confuses me with this flexible syntax...

tenderlove Nov 24, 2009 View on HN

To make ruby programmers feel uneasy. ;-)

MrBra Oct 8, 2013 View on HN

Can you give an example of something in Ruby that makes your head hurt because you don't know what's going on under the hood?

miohtama Jul 17, 2014 View on HN

Looks like Ruby doesn't have ugly hacks.

robertoandred Feb 4, 2022 View on HN

Is there a such thing as "the ruby way"?