From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-10-26T14:17:33+09:00
Subject: Re: What's in YOUR Ruby???  Could Ruby ever be a g.p. dev language?

CodeToad wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> I just finished my first 40+ hours with plain old Ruby (without rails
> for now), and I love this stuff!!  Everyone relates it to smalltalk,
> and that seems mostly true.
> 
> Being a Certified Old Dude (and sometimes a quant-heavy economist), it
> does remind me of the pleasurable experience of learning serious
> programming tripping along with smalltalk on one end and various lisp
> incarnations on the other, circa xerox/parc days.  So...
> 
> What are you doing with ruby?

Pretty much anything I can. At the moment I'm seeing how tightly I can 
tweak the interpreter using "standard" Gnu/Linux tricks.

> What would you *like* to do with ruby?

The "big bad project" is something called RAMEAU 
(http://cougar.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/Rameau/Rameau.pdf), which is 
really more like a Linux distro than a Ruby project, although all of the 
infrastructure above the (Gentoo) Linux level is in Ruby. But I have 
some smaller things I want to do as well.

What I tend to do is pick the "native language" for any given project. 
So when I work in algorithmic composition, I tend to do it in Lisp, even 
though the sort of things I do would work in almost any language. That's 
because I can hack on existing Lisp code like AthenaCL and Common Music. 
When I do something numeric/statistical, I do it in R, and when I do 
scripting/DSL/etc., I do it in Ruby.

> Do you see ruby as a focal-point or general purpose language?

It's general purpose in the sense that it's a good combination of the 
best parts of Perl and Java. But it's not general purpose in the same 
sense as C or C++ -- yet. :)

> Has anyone worked with ruby along side c++ ?

There are plenty of interfaces to C++ code in Ruby -- most of the major 
C++ open source libraries have Ruby bindings, for example.

> Has anyone tryed ruby with Qt4 ?

There is an excellent Ruby library/binding for both Qt3 and Qt4.

> How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity?

Never heard of it.
> 
> Thanks,
> OldCodeToad
> TheOldCodeToad att gmaillll.commercial
> 
> 
>