From: Phrogz Date: 2007-09-22T12:15:04+09:00 Subject: Re: I am new to Ruby and I could use some expert advice as t On Sep 21, 5:02 pm, 7stud -- wrote: > Gavin Kistner wrote: > > Programming languages are a personal choice. There's no need to argue > > about which is 'better' or 'worse'. You must decide for yourself what > > you need to get done, what language(s) allow you to accomplish those > > goals, and which you personally prefer. > > Agreed. However, I learn a new languages because I think it will help > me write better programs. Ruby gets a lot of hype as part of ROR, but > everything I read leads me to believe that Ruby is just too slow to be > practical. Too slow for what? As I said, I use it frequently at work, for a lot of different tasks. Yes, the code generation system that I wrote takes 15 seconds to run, and if you rewrote it in C it might (I'm totally guessing) only take 1.5 seconds to run. But it only took me 30 minutes to write something that I would guess (guessing) would take my very experienced C++ coworkers several hours to write. Using these numbers (which admittedly are totally wild-ass guesses), I would need to run the program 600 times, and have totally lost that productivity each time, before I would even break even. (In reality, 1.5 seconds versus 15 means very little to me for something that is run once a week or so.) Ruby has benefited my employer - it was way more practical to use Ruby than another language.