From: JamesBritt <james@...>
Date: 2002-07-31T07:22:19+09:00
Subject: RE: ActiveRubyScript and RubyAEOSA

> >
> > Interesting viewpoint. Personally I would say that
> > the Unix world *invented* the scriptable app and
> > perhaps the concept of a scripting language (as
> > opposed to the old job control languages). Flames
> > to /dev/null, please. :)
> >
> > But I think I see what you are saying. You want
> > apps to expose an interface the way Windows apps
> > expose a COM interface, or something, right? Or
> > am I misunderstanding?
>
> Exactly! I wasn't trying to start a flame war but 'scripting
> language' means
> very different things in different contexts. I think of Ruby as a
> 'scripting
> language' and Visual Basic for Applications as a 'macro' language. I think
> of Excel as a 'scriptable app' and emacs as a 'programmable app'. I think
> the distinction is clear enough to anyone who has used both.

What is the distinction for people who have not (sufficiently) used both?

(And, at the risk of starting a language flame war, I don't think there all
that many functional difference between VBA and VB.)

I don't know about emacs, but with Excel you can have an application create
an instance of Excel, and manipulate it, or you have Excel load a script and
execute it internally. Or both.


> Languages like
> Ruby and Perl are concerned more with data manipulation. The other group
> strive to be more of a JCL. There competitors are bash, tcsh, etc
> more than
> Ruby.

Well, I'm inclined to say that Ruby (and maybe Perl) is concerned with
object manipulation.  Sometimes the object need be defined in Ruby.  Other
times the object can be an external thing with a suitable API.


>
> What fuels my enthusiasm is seeing (non-Geek) graphic artists at my wife's
> office doing useful work with AppleScript, the COBOL of scripting
> languages.
>
> The language itself has some disfeatures but they find it easy to
> work with
> because it presents an object hierarchy that's already familiar to them.
> WorkBooks contain sheets contain ranges contain cells... They
> don't have to
> create the objects, they already understand them from messing around with
> spreadsheets. So if they get assigned to get some numbers from a corporate
> database and manipulate them in Excel and present the results in a Word
> document, they will do it by hand three of for times and then just script
> the whole process.
>
> Think about how much easier that would be with Ruby.

I've written a fair amount of VBA code for Word, and would love to be able
to use Ruby instead of a Visual Basic variant.

James