From: Dave Aronson <rubytalk2dave@...>
Date: 2011-11-13T09:25:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Share stories about using Ruby outside of pet projects

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 01:21, Kevin <darkintent@gmail.com> wrote:

> i would appreciate it
> if those of you who have had the opportunity to use Ruby in the course
> of your employment might share some of the things you did, problems
> you faced and general gotchas.

I've used it on two jobs.  At Comcast, I did some trivial parsing of
CSV and XML files, plus a small RoR app to let my manager
automagically fill in holes in a spreadsheet of the risk levels of
various projects, broken down by various aspects.  At Rosetta Stone, I
modified an existing RoR app to add a couple pages to a site engine,
and to pass a few additional variables along to the JavaScript that
embedded (and passed the info along to) our main programs in Flash.

But now that I'm "between positions" I'm hoping to do a lot more with
Ruby at work, especially RoR....

Problems and gotchas: not really much, especially at Comcast since the
alternative was to do it in Perl.

Other gotchas I've found in Ruby: mainly the way assigning a variable
in Ruby, inside a method, that you might THINK is one of the data
members, is actually creating a method-local variable.  Example:

class Foo
  def initialize
    @bar = 3
  end
  def methhead
    bar = 5
  end
end

Calling methhead will NOT assign the data member 5 -- you have to say
@bar or self.bar.  Classic easy mistake, but many other languages at
least warn you about such "shadowing".

-Dave

-- 
LOOKING FOR WORK! What: Ruby (on/off Rails), Python, other modern languages.
Where: Northern Virginia, Washington DC (near Orange Line), and remote work.
See: davearonson.com (main) * codosaur.us (code) * dare2xl.com (excellence).
Specialization is for insects. (Heinlein) - Have Pun, Will Babble! (Aronson)