DAdaleharvey·May 1, 2009
Cool, I chucked up a date formatter thats along the same vein
http://github.com/daleharvey/erlang_util/blob/249d7d1e31ed58...
In Useful Time and Date Functions in Erlangdaleharvey
erlang_util
Erlang2009–2009
daleharvey / erlang_util
erlang_util
Collection of random handy erlang scripts
2Distinct people
2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
21GitHub stars
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What it is
Collection of random handy erlang scripts
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What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by week2 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2009-02-11 12:15:38 UTC to 2009-05-01 10:17:15 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 9 | 2009-02-09 00:00:00 UTC | 2009-02-16 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Feb 16 | 2009-02-16 00:00:00 UTC | 2009-02-23 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 23 | 2009-02-23 00:00:00 UTC | 2009-03-02 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2 | 2009-03-02 00:00:00 UTC | 2009-03-09 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 9 | 2009-03-09 00:00:00 UTC | 2009-03-16 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 16 | 2009-03-16 00:00:00 UTC | 2009-03-23 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 23 | 2009-03-23 00:00:00 UTC | 2009-03-30 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 30 | 2009-03-30 00:00:00 UTC | 2009-04-06 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 6 | 2009-04-06 00:00:00 UTC | 2009-04-13 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 13 | 2009-04-13 00:00:00 UTC | 2009-04-20 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 20 | 2009-04-20 00:00:00 UTC | 2009-04-27 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 27 | 2009-04-27 00:00:00 UTC | 2009-05-04 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourcesYou know, funnily, that's one of the things I enjoyed about Ruby most from the get-go: there's a very low incidence of "WTF?"
In Ruby, most concepts that you haven't met before are still intuitive enough to be able to grasp them without being told what they are explicitly. Of course, there are exceptions (inject takes a little getting used to, as do some edge cases with code blocks and lambdas), but take the following example:
puts Project.find_all_by_created_at(1.month.ago..Time.now).collect(&:name).join(", ")
This uses a few "medium-advanced" ruby concepts, like ORM, ranges of dates, and iterating through a collection and mapping the results of the iteration, and yet even someone who knows zero programming has a chance of figuring out what it does.
Or:
recent_joiners = project.all_users.select { |user| user.joined_at(project) > 1.m
Read the rest
onth.ago }
All very obvious. I like obvious code. As they say, code should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. Whatever other flaws it may have, Ruby is written for clear, easy reading.
On the other hand, after the Erlang 'discussion' ("Why OO Sucks") Dale Harvey pointed me to this erlang file: http://github.com/daleharvey/erlang_util/blob/e9057208f88ba5...
The density of WTF's in this file is huge. Who can make sense of the following lines without any explanation?
format([$M|T], {{_,M,_},_}=Dt, Acc) ->
format(T, Dt, [smonth(M)|Acc]);
Beyond "It's something to do with formatting a date of some sort", it's hard to tell what it does or how. And yet, this piece of code is probably trivial when compared to the ruby code I pasted above.
Personally, I really prefer languages with a low WTF/minute rate right from the start. Then I can measure progress in that language based on what I achieve with it, rather than based on how many hurdles I've jumped to get to square one.