From: seebs@... (Peter Seebach)
Date: 2007-07-14T14:20:06+09:00
Subject: Re: I need serious help!

In message <20070714051305.GB5258@demeter.hydra>, Chad Perrin writes:
>Me, personally?  Glorified shell scripting, data munging, and web
>development, mostly.  I'm thinking about hacking together some minimal
>GUI configuration tools using something like the Glade library.  The
>occasional "stupid programmer trick" for fun is also amongst the things I
>do.  I'm probably forgetting three or four more things I do with Ruby,
>but at the moment the sysadmin scripts and web development work is taking
>up more of my programming time than anything else.

As an example from my own experience, I do weekly summaries of a mailing
list I'm on.  I wrote a Ruby CGI script to do most of the repetitive
parts for me, so I just browse through writing up annotations and making
sure subject line drift is managed cleanly.  (Harder than it sounded at
first.)  It took maybe three-four hours to get the script working well
enough to meet my needs, and it saves me about an hour a week...

I also used Ruby to write a program to generate suitably-arcane passwords
and remember which sites it generated passwords for.  Nothing fancy.  Mostly
just an excuse to mess around a bit with Ruby's string handling.

>Writing something like WoW from scratch would indeed be a herculean task.
>There are some libraries for various languages that eliminate a lot of
>the more complex work, but that requires a fair bit of research to choose
>your libraries well and learn their APIs.

Ruby would not be my first choice for the bulk of the game, just because
that's a task that really DOES need the performance of a high-end system,
and even a factor of two slowdown might not be acceptable.

It'd be interesting to compare with Lua for the in-game GUI engine.

-s