Egoless development
When you’re the only one you know working with a programming language it’s easy to ignore style. There’s no one to criticize anything so it’s easy to just focus on the problem at hand and use it to get the job done any old way you can. That’s the way I’ve always felt about working with Ruby, at least until now. I’ve used Ruby off and on since 2001 but I’ve never known anyone else interested in it. Also, I’ve only used it for small side projects so I’ve never developed great fluency. All of sudden now, though, it seems like the whole damn world is interested and I’m starting to think I need to hone up my Ruby skills. This includes trying to actually code like a 'Real' Ruby coder. So that was my mindset as I sat down last night to write a little chunk of Ruby code to process the comment file created by the PHP comment system I use in my blog. The file is called comments.txt and has a very simple format. Each line is a comment in the form: ID | DATA | TIME | NAME | EM