From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2007-06-15T21:20:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Nube

On 15.06.2007 14:04, Bill Man wrote:
> The concept of Dynamically Typed Languages has peaked my interest.
> However, I have spent sometime trying to find what problem they exactly
> solve.  Can anyone tell me:
> 
> - What problems do dynamically typed languages such as Ruby solve?

Often scripting languages are dynamically typed, but there are others as 
well.  I guess Ruby is most widely used for everyday scripting tasks and 
web development (Rails).  I do believe there is a minority that uses it 
successfully for bioinformatics.

> - What is the business proposition for using a dynamic language such as
> Ruby over Java / C#?

Um, I guess there is a ton of them.  Strengths of Ruby are ease and 
speed of development.  So every use case where that is important might 
be a candidate.

> - What kinds of things can be better with dynamic languages such as
> Ruby?

Development with Ruby tends to be faster.  I am not sure though whether 
that is related to the clean syntax and powerful functionality or to the 
dynamic nature.  It probably all plays a role...

> Thank you so much for your help.  I have been searching the web for a
> while and I haven't been able to find anything.

How about just trying it out?  With many Linux distributions it's just 
one more package you have to install, on Windows there is cygwin and the 
Windows installer version.

Kind regards

	robert