It's the extra parens, semi-colons, keywords and type annotations. Ruby makes the tradeoff for legibility above all else. Yes, you can obviously read the TypeScript, but there's an argument to be made that it takes more effort to scan the syntax as well as to write the code.
Also:
const chat: Chat = LLM.chat;
...is not instantiating a class, where Ruby is doing so behind the scenes. You'd need yet another pair of parens to make a factory!
> It's the extra parens, semi-colons, keywords and type annotations.
I always thought such minor syntactic differences are unimportant, except for the folks who still learn syntax and haven't seen too many languages out there to stop caring much about it.
YMMV of course, but whenever I need to jump hoops with some API or have things conveniently returned to me in a single call matters a lot for my developer happiness. Whenever my code needs semicolons or indentation or parens feels such a negligibly tiny nuance to me but things like this don't even blip on my mental radar... I always think about what the code does, and don't even see those details (unless I have a typo lol).
Maybe my opinion on this is just the echoes from the ancient C vs Pascal vs BASIC syntax holy wars while I was still a schoolkid, idk. I mean, when I wrote Scheme or Lisp I haven't really "seen" all those parentheses (but then, I just checked some Lisp code and syntax looks off and takes time to get through, since I haven't practiced it in a long while and it's pretty different from anything I've used any recently).
Again, YMMV, but `const chat = new LLM.Chat();` and `chat = RubyLLM.chat` are exactly the same thing to me - I don't remember actual tokens from the screen, I immediately mentally process those both as something like "instantiate a chat object and assign `chat` to it" (without really verbalizing it much, but as an concept/idea). And I don't think a little syntactic noise like `const` or `;` is making things worse or better for me. Although, to be fair, I could be wrong here - I haven't really did any experiments in this regards, with properly defined methodology and metrics, and my subjective perception could be deceptive. Sadly, I'm no scientist and not even sure how to set up one correctly...
What do you mean by 'assignment or creating a new object'? It assigns chat to ... whatever RubyLLM.chat returns. Do you mean the function could have a clearer name?
Perhaps to you, but anyone that’s ever worked with Ruby knows that there’s no such thing as fields/properties/members in Ruby. There are only methods. Parentheses are optional for method calls.
Also:
...is not instantiating a class, where Ruby is doing so behind the scenes. You'd need yet another pair of parens to make a factory!This is mainly a matter of syntactic style!