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Lol - very funny. I have to agree you; as a Rubyist studying MRI internals there's a lot of very confusing code in there. And FYI Ruby 1.9/2.0 retains the confusing Bison grammar file.

One of my goals with the eBook is to allow readers to get an understanding of how Ruby works without having to struggle through the confusing implementation themselves.

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But do you agree that Ruby is an unholy mix? I would say it is a holy mix, Matz targeting programmer happiness, principle of least surprise etc.

Speaking of internals, do you know enough internals of Smalltalk, python, Perl implementations to judge, Ruby is confusing compared to them? How would you compare them to Ruby implementions MRI and 1.9/2?

No - not the "unholy" part. Like vidarh I'm someone who loves Ruby (why else would I write a book about it!) but I do agree with him about the internal implementation: it's very confusing and hard to understand. At times, this leaks out into the syntax of an otherwise beautiful language. JRuby and especially Rubinius are great alternatives to MRI if you're interested in studying internals - they're much cleaner and easier to understand.

Sorry I don't know anything about the internals of Smalltalk, Python or Perl and can't comment on them.

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