From: Rob Rypka <rascal1182@...>
Date: 2005-09-30T01:19:22+09:00
Subject: Re: In your opinion....

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On 9/29/05, Daniel Lewis <danieljohnlewis@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Too lazy to do your own research? It happens ;-). For a starter, check
> > out http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby
>
> Thats quite a good little page... thanks. However, I am asking you
> lot, in your experience what is Ruby good for.
>
>
If you watch this list for a while, you'll start to recognize some of the
names on that page :-).

Anyways, I've carrying around some loose change, so you can have my $0.02:

I am probably one of the few people on this list who haven't used Rails (I
installed it, and I intend to, but I'm too busy/lazy). I think that Ruby
excels in a number of areas.

The first is as a "glue language," which is something that Perl is generall=
y
attributed to. This usually involves text processing, and between the
Perl-like regular expressions features, OO and Mixins, and iterators/blocks=
,
this becomes cake.

An example: At work, we used Ruby to convert strace output from a build to =
a
list of compiler calls, so we could send them to another compiler-like tool=
.

Ruby also has many good database access interfaces. You can go the more
standard route (DBI), or dig into Og or the Action stuff. My experience her=
e
has been pretty boring, just doing some basic DB queries.

Finally (for this mail - there are many other possibilities), designing an
application is very fluid in Ruby. I have found that I can sit down and
flesh out the design of an application directly in Ruby, so I have a workin=
g
version when I'm done. Changes are really quick (you can even change things
around while running the program in irb to see if something else will work)=
.
Even if it's just used for proof-of-concept purposes (you plan to rewrite i=
t
in Ruby or another language), this has been very valuable to me.

--
Rob

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