From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2008-03-05T04:47:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Zed Shaw on Ruby Pros/Cons: You Used Ruby to Write WHAT?

Christopher Dicely wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 7:20 AM, estherschindler <esther@bitranch.com> wrote:
>>  http://www.cio.com/article/191000
> 
> I'll use language a little less colorful than Zed himself might use in talking
> about MRI, Rails, and the Ruby Community outside of the pages of CIO,
> and say the article has some problems.

I'm a bit surprised he didn't take the easy shots at ruby: not suitable 
for hard real time, for device drivers, for SMP, for embedding multiple 
interpreters in a process, for very low memory situations. Most IT 
managers won't know these things unless you tell them, no matter how 
obvious they are to programmers.

Anyway, he seems to know about web and java gui, but not much about some 
of the other topics he mentions. "Large data crunching"? What about Ara 
Howard's work at NOAA? "Image manipulation"? Ditto. He briefly appears 
to discount Event Machine without naming it or giving specifics about 
why it's not suitable for "server protocols" (if he has a reason, I'd 
like to know it!). I've found ruby extremely useful (with a bit of C 
code compiled on the fly) for simulations that involve "heavy math or 
computation" and for DSLs to specify and manage those simulations.

-- 
       vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407