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Hurry, grab Park Place, the Open Source clone of S3, before it is gone.

Park Place is written in Ruby by Why.

Or use Ruby with Gruff.

Let perl rest in peace. We've had more modern evolutionary solutions for years now. Go to http://www.ruby-lang.org/ for more information

Tell me: What would make it NOT just like VB.Net with curly braces?

Ruby is a dynamically typed, strongly typed, runtime-interpretted, very object-oriented programming language. It was created about the same time as Python (10+ years ago?), but is less well-known in the United States as it originated in Japan. It is the langauge that the Ruby on Rails web framework is based on. See the official Ruby website for more information.

Check out http://www.ruby-lang.org/

Outside of non-professional teenage Slashdot readers who still think the shitty Perl syntax is 'kewl', who the hell cares about the language anymore?

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

I'm especially surprised because the creator is Japanese and Ruby apparently has a big following there.

I would have thought that multi-byte languages would have been a big deal from the start.

If you're already comfortable with Perl then probably you won't have big reasons for switching, but when starting from scratch then the much cleaner and easier Ruby syntax would probably be more attractive and make you productive in less time.
On the other hand, Perl is still faster and has a wider choice of external libraries/modules, but people say it's becoming slower and the RAA repository is growing fast, so it's probably better to stick with the one you like more while keeping an eye on the other.

Having perl as it is, what are the reasons to take a look at ruby. Mind you, I am not saying that these reasons do not exist, I guess I was just lazy to find it out by myself and then again, nobody has yet offered any compelling reason. I have taken a good look at ruby, clean syntax and all, but really I couldn't find something really compelling.

I'm very picky (i.e. a perfectionist), and I've found something wrong with every language I've tried. That's why I'm working on a language of my own (Mana), but progress is slow, as I'd rather take a few extra years and have a better result than rush things out the door.

I get a lot of pleasure out of programming in Ruby. It has a few quirks, but the big problem is that implementations are so slow. Maybe with Ruby 2.0 this will all be better. At any rate, a lot of the software I use on an everyday basis (especially for email) is written in Ruby (by me).

OCaml is a language I could actually write an operating system in. It's closest to ideal of all languages I've found. A friend of mine was actually writing some code to allow drivers for Minix 3 to be written in OCaml. I would have gladly written some drivers afterwards; unfortunately, he abandoned the project.

I'm also a big fan of Common Lisp. People complain about its parentheses, but once you get over that, it's a very powerful language, and, better yet, you can easily extend and adapt it. There actually is an OS being written in Common Lisp: Movitz.

``Also though it is slightly off-topic I also think that Java under GPL would not benefit as much because the model of contribution is really not as easily understood as the OS world.''

With all the complaints about the Java community process being slow and bureaucratic, and the free Java implementations lagging behind in features, I think having a good, open source Java implementation is a Good Thing in it's own right.

Also, I don't know what you mean by the model of contribution for Java not being as easily understood as the OS world. It's not like there aren't any successful open source programming language implementations yet.

Is it possible to at least snapshot the legacy stuff into CVS? I have found that even snapshotting the rolled out tree can help in emergencies.
Also, for the projects you do have in CVS, I found CVS SPAM is a life saver, it was probably the most important coordinating tool we had on a project with 10 or so geographically (and "working hours"-ly) dispersed developers. I did a separate distribution list for each project. It seemed to help team morale during tough times eg, when people would add humorous check in notes at 3 AM, etc.
The problem is if management gets wind of it and wants to be on the notification list and then does stupid shit like trying to infer productivity based on checkins - but they can do that with any CVS stats tool. Used fisheye while it was in beta, but it is $ - I was surprised though, for a Java program it worked well with mercifully near zero conf...

BTW, Damage Control was on its way to becoming a gorgeous thing - A Ruby on Rails of the continuous build/integration world - I wish google would pay them to re-activate the dev on it.
Of course, for you ANT/Maven (the Horror, the Horror) types, there is CruiseControl and others... CB/I Matrix

Perl and Ruby have a lot in common, but they also have some extremely big differences. Probably the biggest is that Ruby is a real, honest to god Object Oriented Language. Perl ain't - it's object support is essentially bolted on. Good if you're not a big fan of objects, bad if you're not.

For a better list of differences/similarities, try here.

• Smalltalk - The original OO language and programming environment
• • The Smalltalk Portal
  • For a bit Free of fun and games
  • Gratis Very Fast - Recommended
  • Gratis non-commercial version of the top-shelf product
  • The online Smalltalk library - gratis
• Ruby - OO in a sane file oriented environment
• • The Ruby Portal
  • Buy the best of the books. Only $25 for a pdf download.
  • The gratis first edition as a WWW site
• SQL - You'll need to store your data somehow
• • PostgreSQL - The Free Relational Database off the top-shelf
  • MySQL - The fast, and most popular, one for Web use
  • Gratis book - PostgreSQL Introduction and Concepts as a WWW site
• C and C++ - Get these downloadable books FAQ & Tutorial.
• • The New C Standard - A huge well written book
  • comp.lang.c FAQ'
  • My own modest contribution

Most people seem to like either Ruby [on Rails] or Python (Django seems to be a good MVC framework, but there are more).

Ruby is a perfect language to learn programming in. It has an excellent command line mode, and the syntax is easier to learn than most languages. As easy as BASIC, yet relevant for use today, and much more powerful. http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

In addition to Scheme, others have mentioned Logo which is a wonderful language that many of us learned in our youth. I would also suggest looking at Kid's Programming Language, Squeak (a Smalltalk implementation that seems tailor-made for the way kids think and learn), Alice and perhaps even Ruby or Python both of which have the advantage of a wealth of documentation and code samples. You might even consider the first lesson to be a discussion of programming languages, their differences and their applications. Context always makes it easier to learn specifics. The Hello World! page is a good place to grab examples of different languages for comparision.

Do NOT teach them a markup language (although McDonald's is hiring) or BASIC (there is no need to damage another generation of brains). Last but not least, if anyone suggests PERL thank them for their suggestion and get away from them as fast as possible as they are clearly mentally unstable.

If the teacher finds the Smalltalk paradigm incomprehensible I'd suggest (s)he try Ruby. The author, quite truthfully, claims it's a 'surprise-free' language. Together with Smalltalk it's one of the few truly Object Oriented programming languages. It's been reported that both Squeak and Ruby are going to be installed on the OLPC machine. ( The OLPC folks change their minds so frequently that I'm now not certain of that though )

Ruby is readable and pretty easy to grasp. There's even a free text, Learn to Program by Chris Pine, which takes the reader through the baby steps of learning to program.

There are two other, very active and famous scripts left behind:

1. script.aculo.us : That have many effects include in it and is used in Ruby

2. script.aculo.us : An active library to help for ajax development.

Tonight, you are a god. Though I'm pretty sure Ruby 1.8.4 is stable (it's also the version apt-get install installed on my ubuntu machine).

Perhaps Web 2.0 is tired?

No, PHP is tired. It's now all about Ruby, Python, LISP, and the more obscure but no less interesting Lua, Scala, Qi, OCaml, among others, and various derivatives and frameworks.

Static analysis is great stuff. I've worked on an open source Java static analysis tool, PMD, for the past few years and I've gotten lots of feedback from folks who have used it to find all sorts of things in their code. Just a quick scan for unused variables can yield some excellent results, and the copy/paste detector works quite nicely too. And there's a book, too!

Coverity's doing a nice job with their tech marketing, too - l think a couple of open source projects are using the stuff they found to clean things up. At least, there's been a fair amount of traffic on the Ruby core list about some things Coverity's scan found. Good times...

Luckily, you there are workarounds, such as using Eclipse instead of swing and a different language to avoid checked exceptions.

I think I started programming when I was 12 or 13 (I'm 18 now).

Having been down the PHP path before, and since you mention that you like to script, I'd suggest trying out Ruby. I had practically only used PHP (and the obligatory JavaScript), but then I discovered Ruby, and I haven't used it since.

Sometimes I can't stop smiling when I see some really beautiful Ruby code...

Do they still ship with CVS dumps as packages ?

Last time I checked on Breezy Badger they were still including packages from CVS dumps.

As an example:
The Ruby 1.8.3 package which comes with Breezy Badger was a CVS dump from several months before Ruby 1.8.3 was released. No wonder it worked like shit. The really wierd thing is they called it 1.8.3 when it in fact was just a CVS dump. Almost a year later and they still hadn't updated it.

Proof:
$ ruby --version
ruby 1.8.3 (2005-06-23) [i486-linux]

Ruby 1.8.3 was released on 2005-09-21 (see http://www.ruby-lang.org/)

How can you trust a distro when it doesn't even have up-to-date stable packages ?
Not that I care since I try to run the latest version of everything, but others probably do.

Wonder how many other packages they got from CVS.

This long post is relevant to today's article because many OO languages still have objectStore methods that save the internal state of the object to disk.

Indeed they do, but things are perhaps getting better. Ruby, for instance, is switching to use YAML for this, a standard that is open, human-readable and terse, the two latter much more so than for instance XML. YAML has features specifically designed to allow object persistance for any language as well as persistance of any data.

It works nicely without creating lock-in problems. Any language with a YAML parser (and most have one by now) can get at the data easily, and even without the YAML specification it's usually obvious how the data should be read just from looking at it.

Sort of... not totally stand-alone in the traditional binary executable sense. You still need the Ruby interpreter.

But several tools (Ruby2EXE, ExeRb) allow you to bundle your program, libraries, and the Ruby interpreter into an executable that you can then distribute. I've used them in the past and they work well -- never had any users tell me they couldn't install the program.

There are various options available for a GUI. I've used wxRuby a lot. It's an interface to the WxWindows/WxWidgets toolkit. I think it works very well, and I really like it's auto-layout features using sizers, although the API is very C++-like.

Another toolkit that people use a bunch is fxruby, which interfaces with the Fox toolkit.

There are lots more GUIs. Take a look at the Ruby App Archive or lurk on the mailing lists to see what toolkits people are using (or just ask them).

Smalltalk, because you are completely isolated from the boring mechanics of programming. Nasty things like files, editors, compilers, linkers.
http://www.smalltalk.org/main/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk

Smalltalk, because there are 2 very good free (gratis),
http://www.exept.de/exept/english/Smalltalk/frame_ uebersicht.html
http://smalltalk.cincom.com/index.ssp

and at least 2 Free ( Libre ) implementations.
http://www.squeak.org/
http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/smalltalk.ht ml

Smalltalk, because is was deliberately designed for small people to have fun,
yet you can grow-up with it.
http://www.squeakland.org/

Smalltalk, because it is well documented.
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/FreeBooks.html
http://www.whysmalltalk.com/tutorials/visualworks. htm

In a couple of words, it Just Works, and your sanity will not be harmed.

If you can't drop the "program in a file" paradigm, then checkout
http://www.ruby-lang.org/
http://www.python.org/

Don't even dream about anything BASIC because your dreams will turn into really horrendous nightmares before you can even turn around twice.

While Visual Basic leads to quick and early (limited) success, your coding style and habits, and your perception of how to solve problems when programming in general, will be badly spoiled for a LOOONG time. I advise you to stay the fuck away from it. Go learn an interpreted, really well-designed language, such as Ruby. -> http://www.ruby-lang.org/

Eivind (Perl Must Die!)

...can be a bit of a bastard, and when you do find it, the newly installed software might not work, or might break something else.

For a case in point, the wireless on this laptop is unreliable under MS-Windows XP and bulletproof under Mandriva Linux 2006.0; it was even less reliable until I figured out that ZoneAlarm kept forgetting to allow DNS access to fully-blessed programs (I had to give it carte blanche on DNS), and finding that out was pretty obscure.

Installing stuff on Mandriva Linux is a breeze, you just scroll down to it in RPMdrake, click on it and here comes the package and everything it needs to survive. I understand that Synaptics, YAST and friends are pretty much the same. On MS-Windows, you first have to search out the program (forex, on TuCows) and a program to do what you want may not be available from a trusted supplier, so you probably have to install it "blind" from some random site on the net -- or three or four of them. And even the ones without nastyware enclosed might have specific, conflicting prerequisites, in which case you're screwed: pick your favourite and delete the other(s). If you can. Under Linux I have the option of pulling down an SRPM (the source! shock, horror) and clicking on it to have the machine make a version tailored to itself. Oh, yes, and if you delete a package (using one central tool), it's really gone (it and optionally any dependencies unique to it).

VB is an effing nightmare to maintain, or to build anything really large in. Use Ruby and FreeRIDE instead -- yes, even on MS-Windows.

I like using Ruby for this kind of work too. The language is *so* much nicer and easier to work with than Tcl, VB, C#, etc...

I tend to use wxRuby (a subset of wxWidgets / wxWindows) for the GUI toolkit. It works nicely and looks good. However, since it does auto-layout using spacers and such, it might take some time to get used its new paradigm. But once you learn it, it rocks. No more specifying exactly where things go; the toolkit ensures everything lines up right and spaces out right. There are some GUI design tools for it...umm, maybe wxGlade I think?

The downside to this is that (as of summer '05) the tools to wrap up Ruby programs into an .exe package were not totally flawless. I always seemed to have to manually edit the packaging configuration file to ensure that it included all the correct files. But that only took a few seconds. Maybe those programs have been fixed since then (hopefully). RubyForge is a good place to check for them.

I use Eclipse on Windows with the Ruby plugin (RDT). It's great. But you can use any old text editor if you prefer, especially for a small project.

The upside is that you'll be learning Ruby, which is not only a great language, but is also on the upswing! And those skills will be applicable to Web app development too (using Rails). Might be a great skill for you to pick up. Might as well learn a language of the future instead of one of the previous century.

Ruby's ugly second cousin, twice removed.

See Nitro web framework for a better framework than RubyonRails. Also see the Og project on the page, a competitor to ActiveRecord.

Long live opensource!

No wonder it needed a re-write, its outdated and crufty, compared to more modern scripting languages. Perl has lost its identity, razzle and dazzle from then it was first introduced..

With hacked on OO, CGI that is painful - there is little reason to revisit, because looking at Perl 5, and Perl 6 - they look completely different.

Thank god for new things like this to keep one amused.

My latest web development platform, is Ruby on Rails. I was a sworn Perl, PHP guru until I started using this puppy - its absolutely amazing. Everything else is just too tiring..

Oh my god, let the flame wars begin!

Ruby's ugly second cousin, twice removed.

It's what clueless people who haven't already migrated to Ruby will be using soon.

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

Why not check out Ruby On Rails?

Websites
RubyOnRails - http://www.rubyonrails.org/

Ruby general
http://www.ruby-lang.org/

Programming Ruby book - 1st edition online.
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/

Ruby Code and Style Online Mag
http://www.artima.com/rubycs/index.html

Small article on how to program in ruby.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/librar y/l-ruby1.html

RubyOnRails vs Java for web development efforts
http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=92#comments

Another comparing Java and Ruby for Web Efforts
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rail s/24863

Despite my love for C++ I find myself writing less and less C++ code. Why? Well, I guess it's due Ruby ( http://www.ruby-lang.org/ ) in my case. And whenever I make an extention in Ruby I write it in C, not C++. Why should I spend 5 days writing a tool in C++ when I can write it in 5 hours using Ruby ?

I feel sad about not using C++ more often though, because it really was my favorite language for a long time. I just can't think of any project idea I have where C++ would be better suited than Ruby.

The libraries available to Ruby and not as extensive as Python

I am a hardcore C++ developer with a lot of Java, so for me Ruby and Python are used for the same position: scripting. Python libraries are very extensive and complete for almost everything I want in a scripting language (even more so than java). Ruby is still a relatively new langugae and the libraries are just not powerful enough (yet...). Withpython I can post to newgroups, send email, do XSLT, generate XML files all with a few lines of code; with ruby I have to do a lot of the work still. I have no doubt Ruby will get there but for now it's still not mature enough.

Like I said, Ruby has excellent constructs for OO development (for a script language); so I have been thinking of a way to embed Ruby into my C++ code to externalize some scripting tasks (Lua is another contender but the documentation to Lua is a bit too obscure and I don't have the time to learn it, Ruby is better documented and easier to get started with).

I can see how Ruby on Rails is meant for portability (I did you the web brick but in release mode), but I personally need performance to handle the load of 100 hits per seconds (not a lot but when I used RoR for the small DB view part it was noticeably slow so I went back to the JSP page, I'll rewrite it in C++ which should solve the performance issue).

... They detected the attack because they 've found a Ruby Script on ther nuclear weapons server. :-P

Try the one-click installer for Ruby from http://www.ruby-lang.org./ If I remember correctly, it comes with a .chm version of the Programming Ruby book, which you can browse at http://www.rubycentral.com/book (or buy the second edition, which is nicer).

Matz, the creator of Ruby, is a Mormon.

It has gone open source.

import sys # only needed because I use sys.exit

while True:
  check = "This is my password"
  password = raw_input("What is the password: ")
  if password == check:
    print "Right"
    break
  else:
    print "Wrong!"
sys.exit

L:\Program Files\Python23>RawInputStringExample.py
What is the password: dunno
Wrong!
What is the password: hehehe
Wrong!
What is the password: password
Wrong!
What is the password: This is my password
Right

L:\Program Files\Python23>

So, you think strong typing and heavy compilation (with all the attendant futzing around with silly little converter classes and twiddling your thumbs while the whole lot grinds through the compiler again) are necessary for OO-in-business-scenarios? Interesting. Can't say I agree though. Highly typed languages are overrated (and PHP is definitely not best-of-breed in the light-typing end) and compilation to native code is not so useful as you might think; there's usually a better level of abstraction to use as a compilation target (i.e. which allows for very fast compilation while providing decent speed), assuming you're not writing some real CPU-heavy code like image manipulators. But then most web-apps aren't about that; they're "parse the input, diddle with the DB, possibly contact some other service, format the output". All the scripting languages are good choices for that sort of thing, though some are better than others for mundane reasons. Reasons like "the natural way to write code is the secure way to write code!" But you take your pick according to your personal preferences (or sometimes those of your boss, alas.)

One word: Ruby.

Hi, I'm a ruby and rubyonrails coder. I find his comment useful. Let me point to another set of links then which is useful with postgresql. http://www.rubyonrails.org/ http://www.ruby-lang.org/ and yes http://www.rubyforge.org/ is useful :)