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."

Comments

Rubydium JIT too

[Anonymous Coward]

According to OSNews, another KDE developer has announced the Rubydium JIT.

Count in one new Ruby fanatic

[weeksie]

I've been using Ruby a short time and will say that without a doubt it is the nicest language I've used for development of anything. period. Now of course some people work differently and prefer different languages but I have fallen in love with it.

After a long, long time mired in the quagmire of Java configuration files and the like I finally gave it a go with a small project (an app server). It took me roughly a tenth of the time it would have in Java and I'll gladly shoulder the cost of slower execution speeds with a little more processor power :)

still waiting..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. for that perfect development environment (besides vi and the command line, anyway).

I'd love a Ruby IDE or "smart editor" but none of the ones I've used can even highlight synax correctly (ever had a regexp like this? %r{'\"(.*\))>} (just made it up) .. ever named a method with a string used elsewhere in the language? they NEVER get highlighted correctly and I end up just mentally ignoring the highlighting).

Also attaching Ruby to KDE, wow. Ruby is so small and elegant, and KDE is.. so.. large.

I much prefer RubyCocoa or whatever it's called that I used once. The Mac and Ruby are made for one another.

Aaargh

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Maybe the code in the Qt/Ruby tutorial linked indirectly from this article (through this page) isn't representative of the bindings. But if it is, I will be terribly disappointed.

One of the best features of Ruby is code blocks. I've skimmed through maybe half of that tutorial, and there are no code blocks in sight.

Now you may wonder why should anybody care about this. Well, simple: there are many, many ways of using Ruby's blocks to make code easier to understand. In the case of a GUI toolkit, I can think of two offhand:

1. Callbacks. The quickest, simple way to implement a callback is to pass a block as a closure to the widget at construction time.
2. Representing the embedding of GUI components inside one another. The tutorial code as written works by assigning a variable to a newly instantiated container, then creating contained pieces and including them inside the container by calling methods on the previously created container. All of the pieces occur in the same level of indentation, and the formatting does not make obvious the containment hierarchy of components.

   Creating contained components in a code block passed to the container is no harder at all; in Ruby, just make the container's constructor yield self to its block. And what you gain is much nicer than what most people will give credit for: the code that creates the contained elements is visibly "inside" the code that creates the container. Once you're attuned to this convention, it becomes easier to see the structure of the GUI and the code from the indentation in the source.

Re:Aaargh

[Brandybuck]

The quickest, simple way to implement a callback is to pass a block as a closure to the widget at construction time.

It may be simple, but it isn't optimal. I'm going to need named callbacks, multiple callbacks, and mutable callbacks. Ruby blocks to not offer me this. The first two cases I use all the time. The third I use ocassionally, but when I need it I really need it.

Blocks are very nice things, but they are not omnipotent.

Re:Aaargh

[Eivind Eklund]

I think you've missed an essential feature of Ruby blocks: You can pass a named block through method(&proc_object).

This makes it possible to handle all of your cases beautifully, even if blocks[1] had been the only core feature.

Eivind.

[1] Technically, passing the callback in the block slot of the method in question. Blocks is a syntactic structure.

Re:Is it ok as a beginner's langage ?

[tcopeland]

> is it [Ruby] ok as a beginner langage ?

Yup, it's perfect. And actually, Alexey just started a forum for Ruby beginners. Might be a good place to ask questions...

Re:and so?

[CatGrep]

since Python has blocks and all those other Ruby feature, too.

I have yet to see anything in Python that is equivilent to the expressiveness and power of Ruby's blocks. (but I'll admit, I haven't kept up with all the latest changes in Python, maybe they've added something recently)

In Ruby blocks are used extensively in the standard libs because Ruby had blocks from day one. Blocks are full closures in Ruby and they can contain any code (as I recall there are restrictions on lambda code in Python).

I have a feeling that when Python folks talk about blocks they have something somewhat different in mind than Ruby's blocks.

For example, in Ruby you could do:

def process(items)
items.each {|item|
r = yield item
#do something with r
}
end

section = "Foo" #just to demo the closure'ness
process(['a','b','c']) {|i|
puts "in section: #{section}"
puts "...Processing #{i}..."
#a bunch more code
return result
}

So we say that the process method takes a block (the part between { and } ).
Just curious: how would this be done in Python?