On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 7:34 AM, Jonas Pfenniger (zimbatm)
<jonas / pfenniger.name> wrote:
> Hi rubyists,
>
> this is a general census to get developer feedback. Please post the
> issues you encounter when developing in ruby. This can range from
> syntax issues, to library support, documentation, or anything that is
> a roadblock when developing in ruby.

1. I know it's a small thing, but I nominate the inability of instance
variables to have ? tacked onto the end. It would be nice to be able
to do:

def reasonable?
  return @is_reasonable
end

Instead you could just do:

attr_reader :reasonable?

It just doesn't make sense to me to have a convention where accessors
are named the same as their instance variables, *except* in the case
of booleans; nor do I see how methods are "special" in such a way as
to allow them to show graphically that they return a boolean. One
argument is that allowing ? on instance variable names is tantamount
to marking them with a type sigil, but I think this is pretty
ridiculous since method names can already have ?. And besides, Ruby
still wouldn't be doing any checks to make sure ?-marked variables
actually are boolean.

2. It would be nice to have a little sugar for initialize methods that
set instance variables without any checking or computation, similarly
to how attribute writers work. I believe constructors in Scala have an
elegant way of doing this.

3. StringScanner#pos should return a *character* position, not a byte one.