That's never caused a problem for me. It's also a tradeoff: in Python, you have to meticulously "import" every symbol you might need, which is tedious. I compared a really good piece of Python code (CORE's Impacket library) to a similar piece of Ruby code (Jamis Buck's net/ssh), and it's 3-1 in average number of important statements per file.
Number of times I've been bit by global namespace pollution in Python or Ruby: countable on 1 hand.
Number of times I've been bit by forgetting the right import statement for a piece of Python library functionality: considerably worse.
I know, "plural of anecdotes" and all that. I think it's hard to argue that Ruby isn't easier to use "out of the box" than Python is, though. How do you say:
3.days.ago - 2.hours
in Python? Because, yeah, "days" and "hours" on Numeric? Shit's all crazy! But totally worth it.
yeah... cause you know... I never forget to include 'gems' because gems has to monkey patch the include function so that it can get at my installed libraries :P
You can use ruby without gems. I think you confuse gems with "pure" ruby as such. I have seen horribly code in gems and I think the whole gems idea is the wrong solution. But I am in a minority here.
I also do not know why cpan is mentiond FIRST as perl's greatest assets. To me i think a language should easily provide the capabilities to the programmer without addons, AND I also think that there SHOULD BE ONLY ONE "CPAN" FOR ALL THE SCRIPTING LANGUAGES OUT THERE.
I find it totally silly that there are any distinctions at all.
But back to gems:
I for example am using Ruby since almost 5 years without gems. Others seem to like it that you can simply do "gem install rails" and thats it (unless the debian package manager starts to hate it again... which is btw another thing that sucks.)
I agree that there are people who are concerned with "namespace" pollution, but I simply think so many people are trying to overemphasize. The worst was when I talked to a C# hardcore guy. He basically claimed that being flexible like Ruby is ALWAYS bad (C# does not allow you to change core methods. You must subclass and change that new class then. This is not a smart solution, it simply binds and restricts the developer, and claims that this will be better in the long run. My question is - why not allow being flexible AT THE CHOOSING OF THE DEVELOPER IN QUESTION? The reason is simple. C# is a typical language that is developed from the top-down.
It would be so much better if creating good languages would be a lot easier, so noone has to cater to arrogant developers who try to impose their thinking pattern onto your brain.
I don't think you read my comment, while I did take a stab at gems, the point was to simple to provide a counter point to his statement that he commonly forgets to import the right namespaces in python. The counter is of course, that I forget to import the right namespaces in ruby as well.
In fact I can think of a common one, that many people forget, we often forget the gem include (being why rails includes it for you).
Also I would like you to name which library specifically causes this problem :)
Whenever I read it, people seem to make up contrived problems - and do not give any example.
I would like specific examples please where this interferes with your code.
So far it simply did not interfere with my own ruby code, and I have written really a lot over the 5 years here, including my own bigger "alternative" to gems. (I wanted to release it, but I was lazy and always felt it is easier to use my own idioms. The problem with this approach is that, while it really makes creating something super fast, I would either have to unbundle everything again so I can distribute it, or bundle everything. Both things have huge problems, because if i unbundle everything it will take quite some time to rewrite things really "cleanly" enough for _other_ people. For my personal needs it is totally fine. And if I would distribute things "bundled" together, which means I could release today, then people would simply complain that there are so many things "bundled" together they simply wont need.
I don't have any good ruby examples, but I've been bitten by namespace trampling behaviors in perl and php long enough to know that any code importing in languages I use need to make it explicit when that's occurring.
