Ruby Matters: Language Beauty Part 1

Beauty without expression is boring.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was talking to a colleague (named Vivek) recently who is originally from India. He was telling me about "Hin-glish", the merging of English an Hindi. I am already familiar with "Singlish", the flavor of English tinged with Malay, Hindi, Chinese, and several other languages spoken in Singapore. Vivek was telling me that it is quite common when talking to someone else who knows both English and Hindi to freely flow back and forth between the languages. That got me to thinking about expressiveness in language. We do this all the time in English without specific foreign influences: we use phrases like "Joie de Vivre" and "Cul de sac" all the time. Expressions in other languages just make more sense; some languages have found a useful, concise label for common human experiences and other languages don't bother creating their own term for it. Phrases like this encompass much more than the literal translation. They manage to encapsulate tons of connotation, not just the denotation of the meaning of the words. (For a supreme distinction between connotation and denotation (and none too shabby language either), check out this Robert Graves poem The Naked and the Nude).

Expressiveness of language makes a big difference. Having concise, nuanced representations of common concepts means less context establishment. This is one of the compelling arguments for domain specific languages: if you encapsulate high-level meaning in code, you spend less time talking about it. This is the vocabulary that describes your business, and everyone talks the same language so that you don't have to start from scratch every time.

Talking about beauty in programming languages sounds silly, because they are after all just ways to drive Turing machines. But people still talk about it. O'Reilly has a popular recent book named "Beautiful Code", which has essays by famous programmers. Reading this book clearly indicates that this opinion is purely subjective. My friend Brian made a great observation about this book: the essays written about other people's code really do illustrate beautiful code, while the ones written by developers about their own code are mostly about cool hacks. Most of those examples I would not consider beautiful by any measure, even if clearly highly functional.

Glenn Vanderburg has a great talk entitled "The Beauty of Ruby", discussing the elegant language design entailed in Ruby. For example, it is necessary in object-oriented languages to distinguish member variables from local variables. Java does this either via scope (which can be ambiguous) or the this keyword. Python does this with self (which is required in some places). Ruby uses the @ symbol. It is unobtrusive, unambiguous, and small. And it conveys exactly the meaning you need it to convey without being too chatty. Similarly, class-level artifacts in Ruby are identified with two @ symbols.

For me, Ruby does in fact have beautiful syntax. It is easy to write, easy to read, just succinct enough to keep you from typing too much but not so succinct to become cryptic. Many Perl developers think that Perl is beautiful (and, Perl was after all developed by a linguist). But I think it goes too far, bordering on cryptic (and I'm not the only one: many people refer to Perl as a "write only" language because it is so hard to read later).

Interestingly enough, even when I was primarily using Java, I never considered it beautiful. Utilitarian, but lacking beauty. But most of the post-Java developers I know still talk about the beauty and elegance of Ruby. I've never heard those phrases so much about other languages.

Language beauty will always be subjective. I explore this idea further in part two of this topic, coming up soon.