From: "Ara.T.Howard" <ahoward@...>
Date: 2004-08-12T12:41:11+09:00
Subject: Re: What are people using Ruby for?

On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, jmh wrote:

> I'm not currently a Ruby user but have heard about it for a while (few
> years). I've started looking into it and will get around to compiling it in
> the next few weeks but was curious how people are using the language. Is it
> primarily for sys admin tasks? Internal applications? External customers?
> Commercial applications?


* satelite image processing using combinations of ImageMagick, Mmap, and
   custom C libs.  wrapping native code gives a good blend of processing speed
   vs. development time.  we are research oriented to tend to try alot of
   things and throw them away - this is painful in C.

* driving legacy applications with wrappers - fortran, c, idl, envi, etc.
   glue code.

* linux clustering software using sqlite to maintain nfs mounted work
   queues used to distribute computing tasks to 50+ nodes

* all sorts of daemon tasks - writing a daemon w/o GC is evil

* bi-temporal database emulation over postgresql (programming api)

* parsing, parsing, parsing.  csv, ascii, and horrible scientific binary
   formats.

* all manner of db code

* html generation - static and dynamic

* gui apps - mostly using tk to control previously written command line tools

* unit testing c code.  easier to glue to ruby and test there than to test in
   C!

* code generation.  ruby -> ruby, ruby -> sh, ruby -> c

* and very little sys admin tasks!

-a
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