From: Jay Levitt <jay+news@...>
Date: 2007-11-18T09:34:59+09:00
Subject: Re: enterprise ruby

On Mon, 12 Nov 2007 10:02:21 -0500, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> I actually thought about ImageMagick when I wrote that. Doesn't 
> ImageMagick have a command line interface? Can't Ruby (and jRuby) 
> execute command lines? That's what I had in mind when I wrote "loose 
> coupling". :)

Ah, yeah, that's VERY loose coupling!  And there are people doing that
today; there's a recommendation on an O'Reilly blog to skip the JNI JMagick
wrapper and just use Runtime.exec(). 

Aside from the obvious performance hit - a new process for every image! -
it just feels too much like the old days of MIS-written batch-processed
no-error-checking copy-a-file-into-the-queue-directory scripts.  I'm
probably being religious there, though.  But the performance issue remains.

> Well ... I'm sticking with "because it's open source and we can" as the 
> best reason for extending a language. Implicit in that is a plea *to* 
> extend the language to the primitive data types necessary for, say, 
> signal and image processing, which are -- surprise -- multidimensional 
> arrays of numeric data packed contiguously in RAM.

I realize that you're talking mostly about scientific software, and that
the image-processing would be a side benefit.  But I do want to point out
that, to a non-comp-sci guy like myself, image processing has nothing to do
with a multidimensional array of numeric data packed contiguously in RAM.
It has to do with thumbnails and resizing and drawing lines and circles and
fonts.  I'm looking for an iPod, not an FPGA.  Unless someone wanted to
reinvent ImageMagick as a pure-ruby solution based on those new primitive
types, they wouldn't do me any good for this example.


-- 
Jay Levitt                |
Boston, MA                | My character doesn't like it when they
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