Idiomatic Rugo

Idiomatic Rugo

A guide to writing clean, expressive Rugo code. Rugo borrows Ruby's elegance, Go's compilation speed, and Bash's street smarts — compiled to native binaries.

This skill covers idioms and patterns that experienced Rugo programmers reach for instinctively. Each chapter is available as a detailed reference.

Chapters

1. Expressive Basics — String interpolation, paren-free calls, constants, heredocs, and raw strings.
2. Collections with Character — Hashes as lightweight objects, dot access, the factory pattern, array idioms, and iteration.
3. Functions and Lambdas — First-class functions, closures, higher-order patterns, dispatch tables, and composition.
4. Graceful Failure — The three levels of try/or, raising errors, and building resilient code.
5. Shell Power — Shell fallback, backtick capture, the pipe operator, and mixing paradigms.
6. Concurrent Thinking — Spawn, parallel, timeouts, and task polling.
7. Structuring Your Code — Structs, modules, the Go bridge, and type introspection.
8. Patterns in the Wild — Data pipelines, builder pattern, inline tests, and lessons from real libraries.

The Rugo Philosophy

1. Start simple. Hashes before structs. Functions before classes. Graduate to more structure only when needed.
2. Be explicit about failure. Use try/or at the right level. Don't let errors propagate silently, and don't panic unnecessarily.
3. Compose small pieces. Collection methods, lambdas, and closures combine into powerful patterns without complex abstractions.
4. Use the shell. Don't rewrite curl or grep in Rugo. Shell out for what the shell does best, then process results in Rugo.
5. Test where you code. Inline rats blocks keep tests and implementation together. Use them.

Quick Reference

• Interpolation: "Hello, #{name}!" — any expression inside #{}
• Constants: Uppercase start → assigned once: PI = 3.14
• Hash objects: {name: "Alice", age: 30} with dot access person.name
• Factory pattern: Functions returning hashes with lambda methods
• Error handling: try expr / try expr or default / try expr or err ... end
• Shell capture: user = `whoami`
• Pipes: echo "hello" | str.upper | puts
• Concurrency: spawn expr + .value / parallel ... end
• Imports: use "http" (stdlib) / import "strings" (Go) / require "file" (user)
• Collection pipelines: .filter(fn(x) ... end).map(fn(x) ... end).join(", ")
• Inline tests: rats "name" ... end blocks, run with rugo rats
• Internal fields: __double_underscore__ convention for private state

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