From Ruby to C#

My intro to the mobile world

I wanted to learn a mobile long time ago, but for me, the road always seemed kind of quirky – You would need to learn Java for Android and ObjectiveC for iOS and I am not a fan of both languages, to be honest. Our company started using Xamarin framework, which allowed to write business logic once for all apps using C# and to leverage native view approach (That part also is handled in C#). For each platform, the speed is almost the same as with the native approach. The idea seemed really cool to me and I asked if I could be of any help in the mobile front. That’s what got me started and now I can share my findings with you.

Static typing

Static typing is something we do not have in Ruby. It seems strange for us to pass type to every method call, property or variable declaration. In Ruby we leverage Duck typing – It’s a great power when you can just call a method on the object as long as it responds to it.

class Duck  
  def make_noise
    "QUACK"
  end
end  
class Cow  
  def make_noise
    "MOO"
  end
end  
class Human  
  def speak
    "HELLO"
  end
end

class NoiseMaker  
  def initialize(animal)
    @animal = animal
  end

  def make_noise
    @animal.make_noise
  end
end

puts NoiseMaker.new(Duck.new).make_noise  
puts NoiseMaker.new(Cow.new).make_noise  
puts NoiseMaker.new(Human.new).make_noise

Press ENTER or type command to continue  
QUACK  
MOO  
file.rb:23:in `make_noise': undefined method `make_noise' for #<Human:0x007f914c87e328> (NoMethodError)  
    from file.rb:29:in `<main>'

shell returned 1

On the other hand, we can hurt ourselves by passing a wrong object and it might take a considerable amount of debugging time in order to understand what has happened. IDE can leverage static typing by helping us with the types that we need to pass:

Interfaces

Ruby does not have explicit interfaces. We can always define an interface with an abstract class or module, but the environment and compiler does not help us with that:

class AbstractUserClass  
  def greeter
    raise NotImplementedError
  end
end

class User < AbstractUserClass  
  attr_accessor :username, :password
  def initialize(username, password)
    self.username = username
    self.password = password
  end
end

User.new("username", "pass").greeter

When executing this code you would get and error in runtime:

Press ENTER or type command to continue  
file.rb:3:in `greeter': NotImplementedError (NotImplementedError)  
    from file.rb:15:in `<main>'

shell returned 1

Press ENTER or type command to continue

On the other hand, Xamarin studio allows you to implement the interface with a single click. :

And if you have not implemented a single method in the interface, you won’t be able to compile. This is only great if you have small objects – I can’t imagine implementing the interface for ActiveRecord::Base class :).

IDE

I am a VIM user and we have auto-completion, CTags and other goodies, but what I found out is that IDE is a really powerful tool when you are developing with statically typed language. Because of the type system, it helps you to autocomplete your methods, implement interfaces and help you to write code in general. It is not something you can easily do in Ruby.

What do I miss when writing C#?

I really miss something like rails console, where you have absolute freedom to interact with the environment – even production. It can come really handy when you need to debug or evaluate problematic part of your code on the server, but I would need to mention that this is not something you can do on a mobile platform – even with Ruby.

Lessons learned

I do not think that language is so important, as long as you care for the craft of code and follow best OO practices as well as do Test Driven Development. C# is a great language with its benefits and drawbacks. The same goes for Ruby. Care for your craft and write awesome code!