From: Travis Whitton Date: 2002-09-25T04:01:27+09:00 Subject: Re: call for commentary: review of Ruby for a magazine (long, sorry!) > 1) is ruby just a "toy" language? OK, OK, don't all shout at once -- but > who's using it for medium-to-large projects, 10K SLOC and up? My project is currently 3k, but it's growing rapidly and will eventually grow to greater than 10K SLOC. > 2) how does the language fare compared to other ones? do you have > comparative-productivity numbers you'd be willing to share, vis-a-vis C > (to be brutal) or Perl (to be a little fairer) or Python? Empirically, I feel much more productive with Ruby than I ever did with Perl. This is probably due to the fact that I *enjoy* programming with Ruby, so I'm apt to program for longer periods of time and with greater enthusiasm. > > 3) in your experience, how has the language's novelty affected its > stability? for comparision, recall the early days of java, and how the > evolution of the class library made "deprecated" a word that...well, > let's just say "sounds like something scatalogical" and leave it at > that, eh? I haven't had any stability issues. I do see bug reports here and there, but I've never had an issue. > > 4) where do you use Ruby? headless cruncher programs on servers? as Web > application glue? GUI end-user programs? fast one-off scripty things? I use Ruby to perform data aquisition and analysis in an environmental lab. I gather data from various insturments, perform various calculations, store results in a database and provide an interface(via modruby) for our users to browse, manipulate, and build queries on top of the data. I also use it to generate reports as to the nature of various samples passing through the lab. My long term goal is to build a full featured laboratory information management system using modruby as the platform, and I expect to begin work on this in the next few months. > > 5) what's your favorite flavor of GUI for Ruby apps? how does using it > compare with other UI class libraries you've tried (e.g., Swing, MFC, > OWL, Qt, whatever)? Haven't used one, but Fox looks interesting. I've heard that it has issues with printing though, and those would need to be resolved before I would consider it a real candidate for a project. > > 6) what development tools do you use all the time for Ruby development? > Irb, ruby -r debug, and vim. > 7) is Ruby just one of the arrows in your programming quiver, or have > you made the leap and left other languages behind? if he former, is Ruby > often your first choice for green-field development? > Currently, I'm using Ruby for all of my programming tasks in my professional work. For cpu intensive calculations, I'll occassionally optimize in C and prove a ruby wrapper around the C library. > 8) open-ended essay: what drew you to Ruby? what keeps you working with > it? what bugs you about it? > I was drawn to Ruby initially because I wanted to write modular systems easily and was quickly becoming disillusioned with Perl's object oriented pecularities. I tried Python, and I was turned away by the lack of consistency in it's object system, and it's rigid syntax(not trolling here... just my subjective feelings on the matter). When I found Ruby, things just seemed to fall into place. Classes and objects were easy to create. Inheritance was laid out in a plain and simple manner, and the builtin classes and modules covered almost all of the ground that Perl's did. I continue to work with Ruby because it allows me to get my work done quickly and painlessly. In terms of complaints, I wish that Ruby provided some facility to compile down to native C code or at least bytecode(like Python). I know that the native code issue is extremely difficult with interpreted languages, but if they could find a way... I also wish that the iterator scoping bug would get fixed once and for all I.e., a = 0; 1.upto(3) {|a|}; puts a # should produce 0 not 3. - Travis Whitton p.s., email me if you need more info(i.e., address, etc...) -- Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.