Leaving the warm blanket of Ruby for JavaScript

After studying Ruby for several weeks, our Dev Bootcamp curriculum has moved to JavaScript.

I'm sad to see Ruby go. It has so much built in "sugar" that makes it easy to write clear and concise code.

But JavaScript dominates the web world, so we need to know it inside and out if we're going to become web devs.

I think it was a great Trojan Horse to get DBC students started with beginner-friendly Ruby and then transition into JavaScript.

I felt pretty naked at first when I was making my way around JavaScript. I felt like I had to build everything from scratch instead of just using the easy Ruby built-ins.

But in researching for this blog, I found I may have been overreacting.

I took a look at some of the most common/powerful array methods in Ruby (select, map, reduce) and found their brothers in JavaScript (filter, map, reduce).

Select and Filter

The idea behind select (Ruby) and filter (JavaScript) is to only return the elements in the array that match your criteria.

Select in Ruby

Filter in JavaScript

Hmmm, these examples look very similar. The biggest difference is that you need that big funky function declaration in JavaScript. In Ruby you just use the code block inside the curly braces to do that.

Maybe this isn't so bad.

Map

Map is used to return a new array with elements that have been modified by your code block.

Map in Ruby

Map in JavaScript

Once again, these two pieces of code are not that different.

Reduce

Reduce brings the elements of an array down to single value based on your code block.

Reduce in Ruby

Reduce in JavaScript

Yep, you have to write function and return explicitly in JavaScript, but otherwise these look very similar.

Conclusion

This is a very superficial exploration for someone transitioning from Ruby to JavaScript, but I think it shows that the languages are similar enough to translate with ease.

Posted by Brian Kennedy. DBC Technical Blog #6