This is Goro

Idiomatic Rugo

A short guide to writing clean, expressive Rugo code

It's a Rugo-dabba-doo time! 🦴

Ruby's elegance Go's speed Bash's street smarts

Rugo is a small language with a big personality. It borrows Ruby's elegance, Go's compilation speed, and Bash's street smarts — then welds them together into something that feels natural for scripting, tooling, and quick prototypes that compile to native binaries.

This book isn't a tutorial. It's a collection of idioms — the patterns that experienced Rugo programmers reach for instinctively.

Chapters

Expressive Basics

Good Rugo code reads almost like prose. The language gives you several tools to keep things clean and expressive — use them.

Collections with Character

Rugo's hashes and arrays are more than data containers — they're the building blocks for objects, configurations, and APIs. Understanding their idioms is essential to writing good Rugo.

Functions and Lambdas

Rugo has two kinds of callable things: named functions (`def`) and anonymous lambdas (`fn`). Both are first-class, but they serve different roles.

Graceful Failure

Error handling in Rugo is built around one construct: `try/or`. It comes in three levels of control, from casual to comprehensive. Pick the right level for each situation.

Rugo isn't just a programming language — it's also a shell. Unknown identifiers at the top level run as shell commands automatically. This dual nature is one of Rugo's defining features.

Concurrent Thinking

Rugo makes concurrency approachable with two primitives: `spawn` for individual tasks and `parallel` for fan-out work. Both compile to Go goroutines under the hood.

Structuring Your Code

As scripts grow, Rugo gives you three tools for organization: structs for data types, modules for code reuse, and the Go bridge for accessing Go's standard library.

Patterns in the Wild

This final chapter showcases patterns drawn from real Rugo libraries and projects. These are the idioms that emerge when you put all the pieces together.