From: gregarican Date: 2007-07-26T10:50:01+09:00 Subject: Re: Why Ruby? On Jul 25, 5:52 pm, Lyle Johnson wrote: > On Jul 25, 2007, at 4:44 PM, al_batuul wrote: > > > Could any body explain what distinguishes Ruby from other languages? > > http://www.ruby-doc.org/whyruby Out of a small handful of languages I've worked with I can say the following: 1) Ruby is _fun_ to work with. Most of the time it doesn't seem like work. 2) Ruby code is easier to read, at least per the way my brain operates. 3) The Ruby community is active and helpful. Despite Ruby's gaining popularity the newsgroups, forums, mailing lists, etc. aren't chock full of snyde replies to newbie questions. The downsides I see compared to other languages are: 1) Looking for a large set of libraries involves skulking around outside of the standard distro. Most libraries you are looking for are available, but it takes some hunting and guessing. Not all libraries are well documented and some docs aren't available in English. This is improving as of late, however. 2) Ruby is still heavily slanted toward Linux-based platforms. Windows compatability is largely a non-issue, but in specific cases I was left in the lurch targeting Windows clients. 3) The killer IDE (ala Visual Studio) is still a work in progress. Although Sapphire in Steel is admirable for pure built-in GUI development you can't yet find anything as straightforward as dragging and dropping Visual Studio controls. Porting stuff back and forth using Glade or Qt Designer is an option, but not as clean as what I've experienced using things like Visual Studio or various Smalltalk offerings. The key point to all of this to me is Ruby is _fun_ and makes sense in the way my brain works. Most of the time I can intuitively figure out how to use a particular API. Makes it nice. Less time digging around docs and less time coding since there's less syntactical hoops. Check it out. You won't be sorry!