Doing something a very elegant way that only the programming language Ruby enables you to. ''For example?'' ---- ''copied from RubyLanguage:'' More than most OO language coders, Rubyists tend to believe in the PowerOfPlainText, using neat-o formats like YamlAintMarkupLanguage, TextileFormat, Wiki and Ruby's own native RdocFormat. While tools for all of these (except RDoc) existed in other languages first, Ruby's small developer base has allowed a very nice ecosystem to grow up around them. This seems to be becoming an integral part of the RubyWay; as far as I know Ruby 1.8 is the only language out there with YAML support in the core library distribution. ---- Probably the motto should just be "doing something in a very elegant way". As an example consider the ActiveRecord implementation in ruby : You create the sql tables and then write this: class Project < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :portfolio has_one :project_manager has_many :milestones has_and_belongs_to_many :categories end done. Now you can write: if my_project.project_manager? joe my_project.milestones << another_milestone else my_project.portfolio= some_pf end puts my_project.categories_count (from http://ar.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Associations/ClassMethods.html) ''Yes, but: http://elixir.ematia.de/apidocs/elixir.relationships.html#dsl-based-syntax'' I'm calling a GreencoddsTenthRuleOfProgramming on this one. --top ---- CategoryRuby