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Korundum Brings eXtreme RAD to Linux
anonymous writes "The Free Software community is on a quest for the next generation development environment. Is it .Net, is it Java? Many (including Havoc) are quick to dismiss some of the gems invented by the Free Software community itself. Yes, Ruby is an incredibly consistent and clean language designed specifically to incorporate many of the best features and ideas of predecessors. Absolutely everything in Ruby is an object and practically everything can be redefined or extended on the fly. The effects and resulting power of such flexibility can be quite astounding to those who have adapted to contemporary language limitations. Now, the Ruby environment has been seamlessly integrated into KDE through Korundum, meaning that well-integrated and first-class desktop citizens for Linux can be sketched and developed in an extremely short time. Caveat: No explicit compilation is required and programming seems so easy it feels like cheating."
Apart from the fact that these bindings are for KDE, of course.
The point being that the existence GTK/Gnome bindings for ages have failed to change the primary language for building Gnome apps, so there's little chance that these Qt/KDE bindings will usher in a new era of anything, either.
There needs to be some consensus in the community about such things and given we can't even agree on the One True text editor, it is unlikely we're going to agree on a next-generation application development language.
Solution: Use whatever you feel like.
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
Personally, I'd love to see Ruby used as the next-gen language for Free Software application development. It rocks!
;)
It's slow, does nothing that Smalltalk wasn't doing better 20 years ago, and has crappy Unicode support to boot.
You might have guessed by this point that I disagree.
Oh, I'm not saying that Smalltalk is a better choice than Ruby, merely that Ruby isn't a much better choice than Smalltalk.
I find it irritating that every few years someone releases a new scripting language, that is basically just Lisp or Smalltalk with new names for all the wheels the author has reinvented, and suddenly people are talking about how these new amazing buzzwords are revolutionizing programming.
Ruby is a fine language, but it's nothing new. It makes certain tasks very convenient, but it doesn't permit anything that we couldn't do before. It's very well suited to rapid GUI development, and it may well be the ideal language for Gnome applets, since computers are getting faster fast enough that it probably doesn't really matter that it runs an order of magnitude slower than Python and two orders slower than C++, particularly as it's going to spend most of its time waiting for user input anyway. But it's NOT SOME AMAZING NEW THING, it's just a good implementation of the same old concepts that people have been enjoying in academia, and bemoaning the absence of in mainstream languages, for decades!
Rant is over. We apologise for any trollish overtones.