Re: Mastering CSV in Ruby book(let) pdf download (37-pages, 185kb) is now free (Donation Optional). Happy Monday! -- Paweł Dąbrowski (Ruby is dead, long live Rails!)

ruby-talk
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Did you now that reading the data into a "true" plain-old vanilla hash requires
this dance

But, I love dancing! Now, you’re taking away all the fun!

Just kidding. But, seriously why don’t you contribute the shorter version to Ruby CSV directly as a shortcut helper, option, or some smart default?

In any case, I’ve heard the alternative saying “Rails is dead! Long live Ruby!” before. I think I like that saying a lot more than “Ruby is dead Long live Rails…” as it makes more sense. If Ruby were dead, Rails would die automatically with it too because it’s built on it. But, Rails could die alone without Ruby dying.

Still, who are we kidding?! Both Ruby and Rails are very alive and well, except perhaps in the minds of inferior programmers. That is programmers who either aren’t smart enough to understand their benefits over similar technologies or don’t have the discipline to learn them well enough to see the light. So, they end up gravitating towards newer yet lesser technologies just because of their greater buzz while thinking there is no difference except in “preference”, despite doing 4-10 times more work with them than necessary with more code to maintain too. Let them just be!

That said, I have great regard for C/C++/Swift/Java too even if Ruby (incl’ JRuby) generally works well for most requirements out of the box. I think having the other options on the table is useful, especially when having special memory, parallelization, or performance requirements. These languages have very deep reliable communities unlike some other technologies and languages that I didn’t mention.

But, I think Crystal & Kotlin are rising stars too. And, some highly specialized languages like GNU Octave and R could be useful in limited domains like Math and Stats. Also, Lisp and Smalltalk are great educational languages as precursors to Ruby, but I wouldn’t use them or use any flavors of them directly for business no matter what some “experts” might say (unless you want to maintain weird code just to show off how smart you are or be bound by libraries with very small communities).

Anyways, I really appreciate Ruby for 80% of development needs at least. What else did you expect from me in a Ruby mailing list!?!!

Cheers,

Andy

···

On Aug 22, 2022, at 11:50 AM, Gerald Bauer <gerald.bauer@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

Paweł Dąbrowski (Ruby is dead, long live Rails!) writes:

Mastering CSV in Ruby book(let) [pdf download (37-pages, 185kb)] is now free [(Donation Optional)].
Happy Monday!

See Mastering CSV in Ruby

It's a great read on the "state-of-art" of the built-in standard csv
gem / library in 2022.

Did you now that reading the data into a "true" plain-old vanilla hash requires
this dance:

rows = CSV.read( "example.csv", headers: true ).map { |row| row.to_h }

vs

rows = CsvHash.read( "examples.csv" )

in - dare I say - my humble alternate csv reader gem / library [1].
Or even easier
or using ruby cocos (code commons) [2]:

rows = read_csv( "examples.csv" )

Anyways, that's pretty much sums up the interest and state-of-art of
data wrangling in ruby.
I am talking to myself ;-). Ruby is dead. Long live Rails!

What's your take? What alternate csv / tabular data gems / libraries
do you use (or recommend)?

[1] GitHub - rubycocos/csvreader: csvreader library / gem - read tabular data in the comma-separated values (csv) format the right way (uses best practices out-of-the-box with zero-configuration)
[2] GitHub - rubycocos/cocos: cocos (code commons) - auto-include quick-starter prelude & prolog

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