Talk about showoffs. Count the number of languages you mention in this mail. I've heard of Java.
Frank --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz (505) 995-8715 or (505) 670-9918 (cell) Santa Fe, NM 87505 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Giles Bowkett Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 2:14 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Ruby? I'm using it with Rails. Regular Ruby; I know the JRuby guys got hired by Sun. Rails is the main thing I do these days. Thing I'm working on at the moment is a sort of scientific visualization thingy in Rails and Flash. Pretty basic by Redfish standards, probably, it's also under a fairly paranoid NDA, but long story short, node graphs in Flash, with Rails storing and processing the data, JavaScript proxying it into Flash, and ActionScript doing the graphing bit. I worked on a screenscraper in Ruby recently, too, but the best screenscraper library to my knowledge is Beautiful Soup, in Python. The main guy on the thing was a Rails guy who didn't want to learn Python, so after we benchmarked the Ruby port Rubyful Soup and found it ten times slower than Beautiful Soup, he hunted down a Ruby screenscraper called WWW::Mechanize which had comparable performance. We set that up with Juggernaut, actually, which is the open-source version of Armageddon, the Comet thing which the Rails guys never got around to releasing. I also wrote some music-generating code in Ruby, that was pretty cool. I did a little presentation on that at the Ruby Users Group in Albuquerque. That was for a music class, and to learn the language better. The main reason I'm using it at the moment is because six months ago I was all gung-ho about it and went and scared up a bunch of work. Now I actually just want to learn Smalltalk and Seaside, and maybe play around with Lisp and Python some more. (And learn Haskell and OCaml.) There are definite moments of joy when coding Rails, definite moments of "wow that's elegant!" Sometimes they're due to Rails, sometimes Ruby, but they're definitely in there. Also, the productivity is pretty incredible. A novice Rails coder can probably get a site going quicker than an expert in almost any other language or framework, except for Smalltalk/Seaside. It makes for extremely fast development. There are downsides too. The main problem from my point of view is that a lot of it is too easy, and there are only a few times when you get to do something really weird or challenging. I'm enjoying it, though. When you have to do something unusual, it definitely shines. It's flexible like Perl, painstakingly clear like Python (good Python), and much more fluid than Java. Performance is not so good, it can be utterly sluggish. Java completely annihilates Ruby when it comes to performance. The biggest upside is probably that you can do the sort of chaining Lisp coders brag about, but with a dot syntax. Ruby closures are pretty great, too, even though they're almost just syntactic sugar. In fact, I would probably be perfectly satisfied with Ruby on every count if it weren't for Seaside. Rails is the Post-It of web development, so good you can't understand why nobody ever thought of it before and you can't imagine going back. But when Rails first got demoed at a Ruby conference, the presenter said, "I challenge anyone here to put a web app together quicker or more elegantly," and Avi Bryant, the creator of Seaside, immediately raised his hand. "OK," the presenter said, "Any of you except Avi." I need to learn more about Seaside before I can say for sure but it does appear to be even better. On 10/1/06, Owen Densmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Just curious: who of us is using Ruby/JRuby? How? Why? > > -- Owen > > Owen Densmore 505-988-3787 http://backspaces.net > Redfish Group: 505-995-0206 http://redfish.com http://friam.org/ > > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > -- Giles Bowkett http://www.gilesgoatboy.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
