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Comment by Shoop | Hacker News Reader

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Shoop·

Cool one liner! Here's some other languages:

Python: 2 * sum([x for x in range(1, 13)])

Haskell: 2 * sum [1..12]

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You don't need the list comprehension for python - just 2 * sum(range(1, 13))

And drop the 1, too

I prefer the explicit example for being explicit, I find it more pythonic.

GPs example is perfect Python; every character has meaning, and it's extremely readable even for non-programmers.

What’s quite elegant about Ruby (in and of itself, not in comparison to your examples) is how consistently it is implemented using its own simple set of core features, with very little magic or syntactic sugar. reduce, Enumerable, what the & operator is doing etc.

What’s so challenging about Ruby is how the language can be abused by library vendors to make all kinds of surprising magic and homegrown syntactic sugar.

> What’s quite elegant about Ruby is how consistently it is implemented using its own simple set of core features, with very little magic or syntactic sugar.

Honestly, I don't think this has much to do with Ruby. This a consequence of using reduce or any other higher-order functions, which come from functional programming, and are now available in almost all modern multi-paradigm programming languages (including Python and Haskell).

I you like this kind of constructs, you should definitely learn a functional programming language, you'll love it.

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