From: Diego Virasoro <diego.virasoro@...>
Date: 2010-11-26T22:50:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby's "More than one way to do things."

On Nov 24, 11:35 pm, Jason Lillywhite <jason.lillywh...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I use Ruby for math and scientific purposes so this is the main reason I
> started looking at Python in the first place - it is used a lot by
> people like me.
>

Welcome to the community: you'll love it here! :)

Indeed the diversity is one of the strongest assets of the Ruby
community, and hence the Ruby ecosystem too. Both in the way the
language works, the people, the interests, etc... And it's full of
people ready to push the envelope who are always trying to improve the
status quo (so much so that some may find the community suffers a bit
from ADHD, but personally I love it that way! :) )

That said as a fellow math/science Ruby programmer, most of the
scientific community seems to have "chosen" Python. Personally I think
that's a pity, maybe due to some misunderstanding on what Ruby is (I
got people surprised when I tell them I program in Ruby: "But I
thought Ruby was just for the web, like PHP"). The Ruby language I
think it's an excellent language for science, but alas the poor usage
by the math/science community has resulted in very few libraries.

A lot of the original hype behind Ruby was due to Rails, so it's
understandable that a lot of libraries are web-oriented. As time
progresses the interest has spread out, first to "neighbouring" topics
and now to more general things. That said science/math seems still a
bit far from where the "action" is, and hence we hardly get much in
terms of fancy, cutting edge libraries.

I don't want to discourage you! As I said I use Ruby too, and there's
no real reason why Ruby could not become a great scientific language.
But I thought it only fair to warn you: the language is great, but the
libraries are a bit lacking. It's a "fixable" problem, but we need
"brave" people to break this chicken and egg situation. (this is all
personal opinion, of course, others may disagree). :)

Once again, welcome to the Ruby community! ;)

Diego

P.S. Make sure to check the NArray gem. It's pretty much a requirement
for anything math related. You may also be interested in Tioga or the
Gnuplot gem if you need to do plotting, and RSRuby if you need to use
R.