From: "Ara.T.Howard" <ahoward@...>
Date: 2004-05-06T23:33:57+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT]Is Ruby Top 1 of Programming Languages that are Loved?

On Thu, 6 May 2004, Dick Davies wrote:

> Funnily enough, I had an interview where I got asked some simple Perl
> questions, which were easy enough to answer.
> 
> Then I got a real beauty: 'So, what would you say is wrong with Perl?'
> 
> 20 minutes of rant later, the interviewer was asking about where he
> could get Ruby.
> 
> I start next week.

that's awesome!

i have a similar tale: we operate in panic mode most of the time and i often
get requests like 'can you do this in 3 hours, if not it's no good...'.  once,
when a request like that was made, i answered as honestly as i could by
saying, 'if i do it ruby, yes.  if i do it in perl, no.'.  needless to say the
task got done and i've been using ruby for every request since.  i think phil
was right on when he estimated the productivity savings - i get 4 or 5 times
over c--, 3 or 4 over java, and 1 to 3 over perl.  my point is this: you may
have a 'ruby job' already!  depending on your situation it may not be selfish
at all to convince your managers to let you use ruby - in my case it's a
win/win situation because i'm happier and they get more out of me.  i've given
three presentations to management in the past and always got the green light -
as far as i'm concerned if your not in a niche that simply __requires__
fortran, c, or whatever it's a pretty easy sell.  in fact, in my environment
i'd assert that anyone NOT using ruby (or perhaps python if that floats your
boat) is wasting tax payer's money.

this makes me think - there is a lot of presentaion material out there
praising ruby (matz's slides, pragmatic programmer stuff, personal
presentations).  what about pooling resources and putting together something
__really__ slick and professional and putting it up on ruby-lang for people to
use?  postgresql is attempting to do this... seems like a good idea.  if only
we could distill _why's book... ;-)

thoughts??

-a
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