Why Why is Righter About Ruby Than He Knows : _why the lucky stiff almost realized what he almost said.

You gotta love a guy like _why. Why? Because he loves art, kids, Ruby, and humanizing computing and he’s not all fired up about things like _why Microsoft sucks or whatnot. But even more importantly he recently said something about brevity and didn’t quite seem to realize how right he is or _why he is right about _what he’s right about!.

Please read that blog entry of his. It’s pretty important, even though he didn’t quite cut to the chase. So, what am I on about? Simple. The reason Ruby is so important and why Ruby-lovers everywhere are so in love with Ruby and with Ruby one-liners!:
Ruby lines tend to be short. Ruby one-liners tend to be packed with nutrition and easy to swallow in one bite. Sometimes they can get ridiculous on the order of Perl-like obfuscation, but that’s when it’s too short at the expense of read-ability.

In graphic design and in mass communications and journalism, it was discovered long ago that they human brain can read only so long or so short a line of text before becoming lost and confused. It’s not a precise thing. The ideal medium of line-length, character count, spacing, and all that, varies from person to person. (somewhat) But this is exactly _why better newspapers, magazines, books, blogs and other text-driven media everywhere try to limit things to columns of text only so wide.

The average is usually somewhere around 72 characters in a line of about 12 point type. Give or take, depending upon the actual type face and all that. Anything outrageously more or less becomes a lot harder to read and manage mentally. It’s also the reason why we have paragraphs that are not too long and we don’t like sentences that carry too many different ideas at once.

Well, kids, Ruby just happens to fit this paradigm without thinking about it exactly in that way. But that’s exactly (one good reason, of many) why Ruby is so humanistic. So easy to like. Ruby is easier to digest. It has a natural tendency towards good page layout.

I don’t know if Matz (松本さん) ever studied page layout or design, or even if he designed the language with this in mind. But I do know that C and PHP and other languages by nature make themselves much harder for the human brain to not get lost trying to follow the flow of the story.

Of course it is possible to write bad Ruby, but it’s possible to do bad page layout too.