From: Bob Hutchison <hutch-lists@...>
Date: 2008-06-17T21:27:10+09:00
Subject: Re: What was YOUR first Ruby Project


On 14-Jun-08, at 7:45 AM, Eric Hegwer wrote:

> I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
> Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough)  side project that you
> decided to take on?

My first project in Ruby was in 2002 and involved writing an XML pull  
parser (<http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampl-pp/>). I had been  
watching Ruby for quite a while and never did anything much with it  
beyond convincing myself that I liked it. If I was to do anything with  
Ruby I would need to have a decent way to parse XML files. At the time  
REXML was slow, and maybe a little buggy, and most importantly didn't  
support namespaces in its SAX-like parser. I should probably package  
it up as a gem and get it on rubyforge. There haven't been a lot of  
bug fixes (maybe 2) since I released it, and certainly no features  
added (why? how often does XML change?). I optimised it as best I  
could, so it isn't particularly readable code. Worse, it was written  
for Ruby 1.6.x (or earlier??) and in that generation of Ruby iterating  
using blocks was horribly slow, so it isn't particularly idiomatic  
Ruby either. I did learn a lot about Ruby though :-)

Cheers,
Bob