Ruby is a wonderful programming language, and when I say wonderful I mean that basically it just makes you happy. As a Java programmer, there are so many things that I need to check and be careful about, and Ruby just makes it easier for you, taking care of you, and if I have one more glass of wine I might get carried away and say that it almost spoils you, makes you lazy – cause now when I have to implement an algorithm, I’d rather do it in Ruby rather than Java, or even PHP, which is still easier, but with all the ugly $-signs (yes, I am lazy when it comes to hold the shift key and press ‘4’, who’s the dumb-a$$ that came up with that stupid idea anyways, ha ?)

One of the things I first do when starting to learn a programming language is implementing a few basic stuff, for example, the famous Tower of Hanoi:

def hanoi(disc, src, hlp, dst)
    if disc > 0
        hanoi(disc-1, src, dst, hlp)
        puts "moving disc #{disc} from #{src} to #{dst}"
        hanoi(disc-1, hlp, src, dst)
    end
end

hanoi(3, 'src', 'hlp', 'dst')

It’s so beautiful to define factorial in one line:

def fact(n) (1..n).inject{|r,i| r*i } end 

And then I usually continue to merge-sort:

# sorting the array from _start index to the _end index
# using merge sort
def mergesort(arr)

    # stop condition
    return arr if arr.count == 0 || arr.count == 1 
    # split the range
    mid = arr.count/2

    # sort recursively both parts
    arr1 = mergesort(arr[0, mid]) 
    arr2 = mergesort(arr[mid, arr.count-mid])

    # and merge
    merged = []
    max_i, max_j = [arr1.count, arr2.count]
    i = j = 0
    while i < max_i && j < max_j
        if arr1[i] <= arr2[j]
            merged << arr1[i]
            i += 1
        else
            merged << arr2[j]
            j += 1
        end
    end

    # continue copying the rest:
    while i < max_i
        merged << arr1[i]
        i += 1
    end
    while j < max_j
        merged << arr2[j]
        j += 1
    end

    # return
    merged
end

arr = [2,3,4,5,6,1,7]
puts mergesort(arr)        	

and if we didn’t have enough, let’s implement quicksort as well:

def quick(arr)
  return [] if (arr.size == 0)    
  pivot = arr.pop
  left = Array.new
  right = Array.new
  arr.each { |i|
    if i < pivot
      left << i
    else
      right << i
    end
  }
  return quick(left) + [pivot] + quick(right)
end

a = [5,3,9,8,7,2,4,1,6,5]
p quick(a)

The downside of coding in an unfamiliar language is that your’e still captured in patterns that are perfect for other programming languages, only that in this one – you can do things in a more elegant & efficient way.

Until next time…ta-ta!