RAD IV: TMTOWTDI · [RAD stands for Ruby Ape Diaries, of which this is part IV.] That glob of letters in the title stands for “There’s More Than One Way To Do It”, and it comes from Perl culture. It is a distinguishing feature of Perl that if there’s something you need to do, not only does Perl have a way to do it, it has lots of different ways. Perl’s legion of evangelists, led by Larry Wall, argue that this is an advantage. Larry has a compelling argument by parallel with linguistics; natural languages usually have many ways of saying anything that’s worth saying. Not everyone agrees that this is a virtue; in particular, Pythonistas have historically grumbled. Ruby seems to fall into the Perl camp. And now, dear readers, I must confess to a bit of duplicity. When I wrote RAD III: Quack Like a URI, I knew that my example was perhaps not the purest possible example of duck typing, but my hidden agenda, namely gathering material for a TMTOWTDI essay, worked out well ...
