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Ahh..

But then you should try Ruby, which is even more awesome than Python in many respects. ;)

> Don't really see how you can compare
> a scripting language with an OO
> development language.

Hm. I think the line between the two is getting pretty blurry. I mean... Ruby and Python are both "scripting languages", but folks have done some pretty impressive object-oriented apps with both of them. Also, the larger a Java app gets, the more it seems that it uses Class.forName and dynamic this-and-thats to work around static typing and such.

I think that "scripting" vs "OO development" language may still be a useful distinction, but it might be more clear when comparing, say, AWK to Java, not Ruby to Java.

collection.each {|x| do_something(x) }

for (Iterator i = collection.iterator(); i.hasNext();) {
do_something((SomeType)i.next());
}

I'm not sure it meets the formal definition of a prototype language, but Ruby seems to come pretty close.

class foo:
def __init__(self):
// do stuff

class foo
def initialize
// do stuff
end
end

One of new feature of this version is Ruby-like script langage "RGSS". This feature gives developers a programing interface.

A description(Japanese) and screenshot.

Ruby is awesome.

import Ruby

Try Ruby with the Korundum bindings - example code is here.

Or go use it now.

> it is loosing developers at
> an extremely fast pace

Is it? Hm. To which languages? C#?

I'm doing lots of Ruby programming lately, but I'm still doing quite a bit of Java, too....

Why not Lua or Ruby? They can both be embedded easily (and Lua has even been used in Monkey Island 4). Were there other advantages for PHP?

Check out my site for some Ruby GUI stuff:
(the gotcha is it's mostly in Portuguese. So jump to the "Exemplos Meus" (My Examples) section. Or use babelfish: http://babelfish.altavista.com)
http://geocities.com/canalruby

Hey, web stuff is easy with Ruby as well. But I don't have such examples for you. You have to get a taste of Ruby to find about its web capabilities. I Know IOWA has an example:
http://enigo.com/projects/iowa/index.html

Further enlightening at:
http://www.ruby-doc.com
http://www.rubyforge.org
http://raa.ruby-lang.org

You know, once you get addicted, there is no going back! :-)

SELECT CHILD AS 'My Favorite Son' FROM FAMILY WHERE SEX='Male' AND YOB BETWEEN 1975 AND 1985; -- Put the right years in.

Perhaps start of with a recipe database using Ruby and PostgreSQL

Alternatively she could always learn to design knitting patterns -- It's virtually the same act anyway!

The problem with learning to program is that unless you can forsee a possible use for it, it's hard to be motivated to follow through with the studies. Your Mom may want to learn programming in the abstract, but the challenge is enough to keep her from following through since she doesn't really know what she'd do with the skills once she's got them.

HTML is the perfect answer to the problem. With even basic HTML she can do something productive. Help her come up with an idea for a web site (Geneaology, recipes, particle physics, whatever interests her...) & put her to work.

Once she has basic HTML, Skip Javascript & go straight to PHP. By the time she's here, she'll probably have some ideas on what she can do with the language, so she'll be more motivated to tackle the (fairly shallow) learning curve.

As far as more traditional programming, I highly recommend Ruby (though the site is down temporarily). It has all the power of a language like Perl or Python, but it's syntax is quite clean and simple, and close enough to natural english that the code quite readable even if you don't know the language. For anyone new to programming who wants to write things that are in the realm of a scripting language, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

i can see why java would be better than c++ but come on! it still sucks. what langiage should they use?
Ruby

Now we have languages that are hard enough for gurus to read half the time, and others that are so wonderful and elegant that I believe janitors of today could learn and use quite easily.

I remember using my first computer at age 5 and playing around with BASIC, and I could do a reasonable amount with it. Lets be glad though that most of us have moved on :>

Other than hotfixes...

Firefox
Thunderbird
SSH
Java 1.5.1 beta SDK
Jedit (the the text editor for coding I've ever used ... not to mention it's free
Ruby
Trillian
GNU Utilities for Win32 (about 120 handy command line tools for Win, like ls, tar, diff, wget, less, you know, all the stuff you try typing at the cmd prompt in windows realizing, after you hit enter, that it doesn't work)

Okay, so thats not ten... but those are the first. I should also mention that one of the VERY first things that gets done is the _uninstallation_ of MSN Messenger.

• gentoo linux
• FreeBSD
• bash
• vim
• perl
• ruby
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Apache
• PHP
• links www browser
• wget
• K Desktop Environment
• Mozilla Firefox
• xchat
• gimp
• Openoffice.org

...and you've got a Ruby app to write, you'll be happy to know that Ruby/DBI is available.

It's being actively developed - a FrontBase release just happened a few days ago - and it supports a big list of databases.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

Of course, if you prefer wasting your time hard-coding OpenGL calls and re-compiling for each make of phone, that is up to you, but as a business model its suicide.

Amongst other benefits, including much faster coding/debugging and better reusability, Sun's newfound cameraderie with Microsoft would then pose no risk to the future of my mobile 'phone code. Sun want to both have their cake and eat it, which is not a sustainable model of reality. Microsoft's view is much simpler: they want your piece of the cake, now, or they'll bury you in lobbyists and lawyers. It suits them to leave Scott's delusions intact.

Ruby, I might add, integrates with Java and you can even compile Ruby to Java bytecode if you like. This gives you a choice of JRE or native target. Ooh, let me think, which language would I rather use?

*cough*

array = [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ]
array.each do |i|
puts i
end

hash = { 1 => "one", 2 => "two", 3 => "three" }
hash.each_pair do |key,value|
puts "#{key} = #{value}"
end

...but is there any reason why a CIFS client (or server) couldn't be written in a higher level language like Ruby?

Obviously there'd be a speed hit, but it seems like it'd be a lot faster to develop in, and time-critical bits could be written in C and accessed via Ruby/DL or whatever.

Ditto for Python, of course... same sort of advantages/issues.

I can see tumbleweeds rolling through this thread. Too "Just woke up" to link, google for this stuff. xfce - Nice little window manager for X, a slight hassle to build but otherwise a great WM for those who want something that screams "minimalist". If only they'd allow me to shove the menubar into the taskbar so I don't have to have two bars on autohide then I'd be using it right now. Ruby - Goddamn, this is a wonderful language! It's as close to "I think, it does" as you can get without having neural implants. That's about all that I can think of. Ignoring the usual (gaim, etc) because they're very well known.

Learn more than one programming language, preferably many different styles, like scripting, object-oriented, functional, logic, etc.

The other thing is, if you're expecting to use a library of some kind, check for availability. Python has the edge right now AFAIK but that doesn't matter unless Python has something that Ruby doesn't that you need, or vice versa; for most people my impression is that the necessary modules are there in both languages.

I have never used python, so I can't comment on whether python has more readily available libraries than ruby has, but ruby has a CPAN-like institution called RAA and raa-install (the ruby version of "perl -MCPAN -e shell"). Does python have something similar?

...he's doing a presentation on Ruby.

The slide images alone should be worth attending... he's hunted far and wide for images of pythons, pearls, rubies, and such-like.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goat.cx. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goat.cx. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

No, I mean like:

Doc

Something a little more thorough.

http://www.perldoc.com/

Unit Testing

Not just wrappers, but something a little more thorough and mature like say from executable to module.

Unit Testing

Library Repository

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/
..pales in comparison to...

http://www.cpan.org/

Portability

[Acorn] [AIX] [Amiga] [Apple] [Atari] [AtheOS] [BeOS] [BSD] [BSD/OS] [Coherent] [Compaq] [Concurrent] [Cygwin] [DG/UX] [Digital] [DEC OSF/1] [Digital UNIX] [DYNIX/ptx] [EMC] [Embedix] [EPOC] [FreeBSD] [Fujitsu-Siemens] [Guardian] [HP] [HP-UX] [IBM] [IRIX] [Japanese] [JPerl] [Linux] [LynxOS] [Macintosh] [Mac OS] [Mac OS X] [MachTen] [Minix] [MinGW] [MiNT] [MPE/iX] [MS-DOS] [MVS] [NetBSD] [NetWare] [NEWS-OS] [NextStep] [Novell] [NonStop] [NonStop-UX] [OpenBSD] [ODT] [OpenVMS] [Open UNIX] [OS/2] [OS/390] [OS/400] [OSF/1] [OSR] [Plan 9] [Pocket PC] [PowerMAX] [Psion] [QNX] [Reliant UNIX] [RISCOS] [SCO] [Sequent] [SGI] [Sharp] [Siemens] [SINIX] [Solaris] [SONY] [Sun] [Symbian] [Stratus] [Tandem] [Tru64] [Ultrix] [UNIX] [U/WIN] [Unixware] [VMS] [VOS] [Win32] [WinCE] [Windows 3.1] [Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP] [z/OS]

User Community

A little more world wide and established.

http://www.pm.org/ ...in addition to the mailing lists.

So, what were you on about again?

From the parent parent parent poster. "Ruby has almost all of the power of Perl, with none of the ugliness" isn't quite a fair statement, considering Ruby is lacking or behind on almost everything else Perl is superior at. Ruby is still playing catch up, and depending on who you ask, can also be considered ugly.

You mean like:

Doc

http://www.ruby-doc.org/

http://www.rubycentral.com/book/

Unit Testing

http://testunit.talbott.ws/

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyUnit

Library Repository

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/

Portability
Source compiles on anything vaugely Unix like

Windows binaries available

User Community
comp.lang.ruby

So, what were you on about again?

Karma-whoring reference link

> don't forget ruby! =)

Right on! Read more about Ruby here, and check out lots of projects using Ruby here - games, sysadmin utilities, wrappers for WxWindows and ImageMagick, and so forth. Good stuff!

Ruby seems to be a very good programming language (somewhere between Python and Perl) - unfortunately, the developer mailing list is only in Japanese, as is a lot of documentation.

"Learn Scheme. Download "DrScheme" and use it while you go through "How to Design Programs," a free online book for learning to program with Scheme. After that, go to half.com and buy "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" for around $10 (it'll be an old edition, but that's alright) and read through it, doing all the exercises it suggests.

If you do that, you'll not only know how to program, but you'll be a better programmer than probably 97% of the people on this board. Which doesn't say much, to be sure, but you'll find that the solid basis in programming that you've developed will allow you to learn any language you want easily. And you'll be able to program well in those languages."

Dr. Scheme
How to Design Programs (Uses Scheme to teach programming)
The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (also uses Scheme to teach programming)

For those who're interested in Ruby, I've found a tutorial on that as well.

= 9J =

...wrapper in Ruby right here. Could be handy down the road...

require 'dl'

User32 = DL.dlopen("user32")
Kernel32 = DL.dlopen("kernel32")
MB_OKCANCEL = 1
message_box = User32['MessageBoxA', 'ILSSI']
r,rs = message_box.call(0, 'ok?', 'error', MB_OKCANCEL)

Forty-seven years after IBM unleashed it, Fortran (formula translation), the original "high-level" programming language, would seem to be the infotech equivalent of cuneiform. But it's still widely used, especially in scientific computing.

...including ant algorithms, simulated annealing, and fuzzy logic is M. Tim Jones' AI Application Programming.

The examples are especially helpful; they're written in nice portable C. I've been working on a little project to translate them to Ruby; porting notes and Gnuplot charts and such are here and the code for the Ant Algorithm translation is here.

What about Ruby (ruby-lang.org). It's easy to learn, powerful and has a reasonable set of classes and methods built-in. It's also quiet widespread nowadays, lightweight compared to Python and easy to embed via libruby.so
see the Ruby book (section Embedding a Ruby Interpreter

echo 'print "hello world\n"' >hello.rb

echo '#!/usr/bin/ruby' > hello.rb
echo 'print "hello world\n"' >> hello.rb

So did I win this dick-shrinkage competition? (-:

It's up to the folks running the corporations to do what they want. We pay for and administer RubyForge because Ruby helps us do our job (application integration and such-like) faster and better.

The Ruby community gets a nifty resource, we get the company name on the front page - everybody's happy. What's not to like?

Everybody here has. Just use the Google calculator. Well, at least the first few digits can be compared.

Probably the simplest solution is to use Ruby:
ruby -e "p 39807508642406493739712550055038649119906436234252 6708406385189575946388957261768583317 * 47277214610743530253622307197304822463291469530209 7116459852171130520711256363590397527"

which prints
18819881292060796383869723946165043980716356337941 73827007633564229888597152346654853190606065047430 45317388011303396716199692321205734031879550656996 221305168759307650257059

You have to remove the spaces, slashdot seems to automatically add them.

The Ruby will help you.
This is an OO interpreter which can multiply big integers without any additional modules.

JavaScript is pretty elegant... if you want a more "full-fledged" language that has similar elegance, even more simplicity/grace, and more libraries, try ruby. Don't let a few surface features or initial impressions fool you into thinking it's anything like Perl (or Python). It would probably make a good beginner language; it certainly makes a great "advanced" language. ;-)

I took the red pill [python.org].

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.