From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2003-08-20T23:41:55+09:00
Subject: Re: social engineering (was)

On Wednesday, August 20, 2003, 10:28:21 PM, Brandon wrote:

> In the future, I think such suggestions would be more effective if you
> include a URL to a specific, relevant post.  When someone first mentioned
> ruby-talk, they mentioned it as though everyone already knew what it was.  I
> didn't; I assumed it was some chat channel somewhere and I wasn't going to
> delve into that sort of thing.

That's because, contrary to common guidelines of Usenet etiquette -
which you'll no doubt declare are of no interest to you personally
right now - you have not spent any time lurking to get the feel of the
group.  If you did, you would see a regularly-published comp.lang.ruby
FAQ, containing posting guidelines and links to resources, like
www.ruby-talk.org.  Of course, you could have looked at
www.ruby-lang.org as well.  Not too hard, is it?

Now, so that you might get some specific value out of this thread, let
me pontificate on 3D games/grafix programming.

Ruby, by itself, is all but useless for such programming.  It is too
slow.  If you write some time-critical stuff in C, you might get away
with it, but even then I suspect that your domain requires mature and
specific libraries and programming environments, which, in Ruby, are
rarely available for niche "markets".

Ruby would very likely be a useful tool at the fringes of 3D
programming, just like I use it for a wide array of tasks only
tangentially related to my main job.  But since you have an
accountant's view of learning languages, Ruby is unlikely to help you
here.

The specific value of Ruby over comparable languages (Python, Perl,
Tcl, Smalltalk?) is its combination of elegance and practicality (for
most tasks except 3D programming).  All other languages have one or
the other.  This assessment is part subjective and part objective.
Search the archives, if such behaviour becomes you, if you want to see
various points of view.  Again, your accountant's view of computer
languages does not acknowledge elegance as a worthwhile pursuit in
and of itself, so I suggest you don't bother with Ruby.  Personally, I
learned it in less time than you have spent posting to this forum, and
I'm not joking.  I learned it because Perl was too difficult for a
reasonably simple task (involving data structures).  If and when you
find other solutions inadequate I suggest you try Ruby as well.

Ruby has been good to me, but it's unlikely to offer much to you.

Hope this helps,
Gavin