From: jamesvtoomey@... (James Toomey)
Date: 2004-05-04T08:43:59+09:00
Subject: Re: What do you use Ruby for?

I think you mentioned in an earlier post that you're a VB & VBScript
programmer. This is also my primary field of work, so I can attest to
Ruby's usefulness in replacing lots of the applications that I write
for people. I used to write these apps in VB, but this meant keeping
all the source code files in a separate directory, then recompiling
the *.exe file each time, testing, recompliling, etc. With a Ruby
script, I can just open the script right on the user's computer, make
a change to the code, and re-run it right there. It's an incredible
time saver.
Also, I write lots of SQL Server stored procedures, and use Ruby to
help me write the code. For example, if I have to type
Select day01, day02, day03, ... up through 31, instead of manually
typing all 31 field names, I just use a couple quick lines of Ruby
code:
1.upto(9){|x| puts 'day0' + x.to_s + ','}
10.upto(31){|x| puts 'day' + x.to_s + ','}
and I have my complete list. There are many areas like this where it's
useful. I've had people ask me for a list of all the Word documents
with more than 100 characters in the filename's length. This kind of
search goes beyond Windows' searching capability, so I have a Ruby
script to search for this. I used to write these in VBScript, but
there was no easy way to make a GUI front-end. It's so easy to make a
GUI for these scripts using the FXRuby examples.
Like you, I'd love to see Ruby replace VB for rapid application
development. It has the same readability and clarity as VB which helps
novices, but also has the power and object-orientedness that VB lacks.
(Yes, I know that VB.Net adds all that, but that's another story.)