From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2006-03-16T02:16:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for Java Folks?

From: "Eric Schwartz" <emschwar@fc.hp.com>
>
> I've agreed to give a brief talk on Ruby for the Pikes Peak Java
> Developers Group.  I've done stuff like this before at work, but that
> was for a crowd coming from a background of shell scripting and Perl.
> I'm not much of a Java guy myself, but I know there's a lot of overlap
> between the Java and Ruby communities.  I can easily spend 45+ minutes
> on Ruby no matter what, but if any of you have any suggestions on what
> an audience of Java programmers would be interested in, I'd welcome
> suggestions.

One possibility might be to show them JRuby?  I used to do
that with Jython.  Show Java people Python by running Jython
in interactive mode, and creating Swing or AWT windows right
from the command line.  I presume JRuby has an IRB. . . .

If JRuby works like Jython, you can load any ol' compiled
Java class and instantiate Java objects and call methods on
them interactively.

Back when I was programming in Java, I did as much coding in
Jython as possible, including writing all my unit tests in
PyUnit instead of JUnit.  Far less tedious, from my point of
view.  These days, I'd want to use JRuby instead of Jython...

Well, just a thought. . . 

Regards,

Bill