From: Gary Shea <shea@...>
Date: 2005-09-22T15:31:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Large Ruby Apps ?

On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 14:52 +0900, Jurgen Stroo wrote:
> Well, supply these tools you've written to the community then, so the next
> time someone is in need of these tools, they actually *are* there, and
> this will help to get Ruby bigger and more useful for even more projects,
> so the 'lack of tools in Ruby' issue will be history sooner.
> :)
> 
> Jurgen

An excellent idea!  In fact, two of them are on RubyForge already: Seep
and Mockery, a Spring-like DI tool and a EasyMock-like mock-object
generator.

Seep is very much ready for serious use -- I have maybe 6 different
projects using it, in some cases configuring as many as 100 objects.  It
has not found much of an audience yet, which I suspect means that most
DI applications in Ruby are still fairly small.  Then again, I may have
a failure of vision :)  If I can ever get the current revision finished
(it's a big one, introducing multiple containers), there will be a gem
available.

Mockery is usable but is still under pretty heavy development.  See the
announcement on this list from a few weeks back.  Mockery has a gem
(under 'mockery', I hope!).

Regards,

    Gary

> 
> ###   http://bash.org/?23601 - bash.org goodie   ###
>  <mage> what should I give sister for unzipping?
>  <Kevyn> Um. Ten bucks?
>  <mage> no I mean like, WinZip?
> 
> Although very unlikely, it seems Gary Shea stated on Sep 22 that :
> 
> > On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 05:30 +0900, Warren Seltzer wrote:
> > > I am coming to Ruby having used the usual list of scripting and C*  languages.  Since Ruby
> > > has such powerful programming features, I think it may be used for some really large
> > > system.  My decades long observation of software is that small programs that succeed
> > > become large programs.
> > >
> > > But I am concerned about Ruby's suitability for programming in the large.  First off, the
> > > lack of the requirement to declare variables sounds like an invitation to programming
> > > bugs.  It's just too easy to assign something to a misspelling of a variable name.  Make
> > > the same spelling mistake again and you won't even get a warning about an undefined
> > > variable.
> >
> > I've only been developing in Ruby for a few months, and in a very limited problem domain.  Some years ago I wrote most of a fairly large Perl and Java system, over the course of maybe five years.  It was written without any kind of automated testing.  That code always made me nervous, although at the time I didn't really understand that there was a way to avoid that.
> >
> > My recent coding experience with Ruby, written with full
> > unit/integration/acceptance tests, feels far more solid.  At this point
> > I only have 16K lines of ruby files (meaning of course far less actual
> > code), but with good testing I do not feel that sense of impending doom
> > that I have felt before.
> >
> > The biggest issue it seems to me is tools.  I've been writing a lot of
> > infrastructure tools that aren't available in Ruby, or are only
> > available in lightweight forms.  That can really slow you down!
> >
> >     Gary
> >
> > > For example this 1-line program issues no error:
> > >
> > > puts @whatever
> > >
> > > This is a code bug that a statically typed compiler would scream about.
> > >
> > > -------------------
> > >
> > > Also: Is anybody doing a port to 64-bit systems?
> > >
> > > -------------------
> > >
> > > Also, a history question.  With Ruby coming out of Japan, why wasn't Unicode support done
> > > earlier?  You'd think it would be insulated mono-lingual Americans who would delay that...
> > >
> > >
> > > Warren Seltzer
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
>