From: Kev Jackson <kevin.jackson@...>
Date: 2005-09-30T18:03:13+09:00
Subject: Re: In your opinion....


>Ruby is good at attracting bores. Notice how many people have replied to 
>your message with non-answers, perhaps supposed to be amusing, but really 
>just irritating and unfunny. Or worse, the presumptuous : "go and do your 
>homework". Makes me feel an unchristian desire to kill.
>
>Perhaps this is the penalty of a geek language; the signal to bore ratio in 
>this group is not so good.
>
>  
>
Why would you say that ruby is a geek language?  Are not all computer 
languages at least a little geeky?  And to be honest with you I find 
this to be the opposite, there are far more people on this list who 
(like myself) seem to have just started with ruby coming from 
php/perl/$dynamic language than people with the deepest ruby knowledge 
(although there are a few of those too).

If you want to see real evangilizing, drop in the rails mailing list :)

to answer the original question..

 From my experience ruby is useful for data munging tasks, it's useful 
for prototyping (rails is a good framework to build a little just to get 
initial feedback from the customer).

They're the only things I've used ruby for so I'd be lying if I said 
that you could program satellites/mars rovers/"enterprise thingies" etc.

On a personal note, I like it, I like it more than Java, more than C, 
much more than VB or C#.  It feels productive to me - no more 
compililations is a good thing when you have to knock up a one-off 
tool.  On the other hand it's currently an interpreted language so for 
certain classes of problem (HPC/TPC) it's probably not the best choice 
yet.  Still Lisp feels hyper-productive and can be compiled, Haskell 
also feels good and you can compile that, but neither of them as as easy 
to pick up as ruby, so it depends a lot on what you want

I'm going to use it to build up a small app that I've got 50% complete 
in Java to try it in a different problem domain, I'll be initerested to 
see how much difficulty I have with it there (UI+ natural language data 
crunching)

Kev