From: Jared Nance <nancejk@...>
Date: 2009-04-12T04:14:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Can Ruby stay ahead ?

Ruby is also gaining a (minor for now) foothold in some of the  
scientific disciplines - at least physics.  I know there are Ruby  
bindings for the CERN ROOT libraries (which I personally use) that  
make life just that much easier.  If it wants to truly compete in the  
academic setting, it will have to do benchmark battle with python -  
and I am under the impression that 1.9 goes a long way towards doing  
just that.

For those of us who like Ruby because of its paradigm and not because  
of its performance, I think there will be a consistent market.  And if  
the language can improve on the latter, it can only improve the  
situation.

In my opinion, one of the real threats is that MacRuby will do to Ruby  
what Obj-C 2.0 did to Obj-C - which is to say shift the development  
emphasis towards compatibility with the proprietary Cocoa libraries.   
Don't get me wrong - I am writing this from a mac and I do like the  
Apple platform, but I do most of my actual hard core crunching on  
Linux machines.

Two cents.



On Apr 11, 2009, at 9:25 AM, Phlip wrote:

> Robert Dober wrote:
>
>> Forgive my ignorance, should language X be on the Tiobe Index? For
>> what reason? Never heard of that one before (duking, but that is the
>> truth).
>
> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
>
> Java is number 1 due (in my exalted opinion) to corporate support, a  
> huge critical mass of active projects using it, academic support,  
> and "enterprise support". The latter is roughly equivalent to "we  
> had to spend a quintillion dollars on it last quarter, so it must be  
> powerful stuff!"
>
> C is number 2 due to almost complete saturation of the systems and  
> OS programming layers. The next layer above machine language is C,  
> so if you have silicon, you need C between it and your higher level  
> systems.
>
> C++ is number 3 due to complete bidirectional integration with C,  
> plus all the same reasons as Java, plus C-like (or better)  
> performance.
>
> PhP is 4 because - until Rails - it was the default choice for RAD  
> website development. Non-RAD website development is very rare...
>
> Visual Basic is 5 because MS markets it to your non-technical boss  
> as "simpler than all those fragile languages that cause bugs." 'nuff  
> said.
>
> JavaScript is on the list because it extends HTML to make your  
> browser actually do stuff. It goes where HTML can't go.
>
> C# made the list because it's a Java clone, and hence a "duopoly" in  
> the same Enterprise space.
>
> And the Duck Typing languages - Perl, Python, Ruby - are on the list  
> due to the LAMP website architecture, where P stands for any  
> interPreted language.
>
> Lua is on the list because it provides the scripting layer - and  
> Duck Typing - for video games.
>