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Ruby Off the Rails
An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting writeup on Ruby that takes a look at the programming language as a stand-alone solution rather than defining it in terms of Rails. From the article: 'Ruby on Rails is just one facet of what makes Ruby great, just like EJB is only part of the Java enterprise platform. Andrew Glover digs beneath the hype for a look at what Java developers can do with Ruby, all by itself. Ruby's syntax is quite different from that of the Java language, but it's amazingly easy to pick up. Moreover, some things are just plain easier to do in Ruby than they are in the Java language.'"
Why? The speed of C and C++ are hardly needed for most applications
This is the same excuse I have heard for decades when fans of a language try and 'justify' it's lack of performance. Sooner or later a lack of performance really does become a problem - if it wasn't then many Ruby developers would not be working on high-performance VMs for the language.
There are situations where performance doesn't matter, but this is not true for 'most' applications.
I really like Ruby, but I will find much wider use for it when it is truly fast.
That goes for any sane modern language.
I am trolling
Wasn't Java itself once defined mostly in terms of C++, and isn't C# now defined in terms of Java?
VKh
Most of the things I love about Ruby are qualities that it inherits from the Smalltalk programming language. Typing objects instead of variables, everything is an object, object-based encapsulation, blocks as objects, polymorphic collections with enumerators, and the overall style of programming. Ruby is the first language since Smalltalk that I could really grow to love. It adds a lot that Smalltalk doesn't have, like regular expression syntax and better case statements, modues and mixins, and easier access to metaprogramming.
In some ways Ruby is a bit too dynamic - one of the strengths of Smalltalk is its simplicity and the predictability of your code. With Ruby it's easy to adopt a programming style that makes it difficult to predict what will happen when you do something in your code. Experienced programmers should be able to avoid those pitfalls, but I worry that some of the features will ecourage neophytes to create code that is difficult to maintain or understand.
> Sooner or later a lack of performance really does become a problem
my limited history of languages says, a lack of performance is taken care of by compiler/VM writers when a market for such comes about.
C was unacceptable, and is now the standard for speed. C++ was way too slow now their are 100's of optimizers to turn off all the features that cause it to be slower than C.
Java started out with horrible performance, but this story talks many times about how fast it is, it has compilers now, and a hundred different optimized VM venders to speed it up.
I see no reason why Ruby would be slower as a language, except the lack of optimizers, perhaps due to the lack of time in the spotlight, and thus the lack of a market requesting it.
Because not getting the best performance out of hardware, no matter how old or new it is, puts your application at a disadvantage compared to your competitors. No matter how much you may try and justify things, your users don't care about the language you use to develop - they care about performance.
Simply not true. 95% of software is developed in-house, by small development teams that don't exactly have time to spare. Managers care about productivity, about getting more features implemented in the same time. An extra server costs what, the same as hiring a programmer for a single month?
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(s);
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Only crappy developers. The better ones understand that software development (not just coding, but analysis, architecture, and design) is actually a process of documenting, managing, and reducing complexity, to the greatest extent possible.
Nonaggression works!
Bullshit. Managers like Java because it helps their team achieve their business objectives better than the other languages you describe.
Hmmm, this attitude sounds somewhat familiar. Oh yeah, Paul Graham has written about it at length in this essay:
The pointy-haired boss miraculously combines two qualities that are common by themselves, but rarely seen together: (a) he knows nothing whatsoever about technology, and (b) he has very strong opinions about it.
Suppose, for example, you need to write a piece of software. The pointy-haired boss has no idea how this software has to work, and can't tell one programming language from another, and yet he knows what language you should write it in. Exactly. He thinks you should write it in Java.
Why does he think this? Let's take a look inside the brain of the pointy-haired boss. What he's thinking is something like this. Java is a standard. I know it must be, because I read about it in the press all the time. Since it is a standard, I won't get in trouble for using it. And that also means there will always be lots of Java programmers, so if the programmers working for me now quit, as programmers working for me mysteriously always do, I can easily replace them.
On your own dime, go jump in leaf piles, run through a field of flowers, play with Python, Ruby or whatever is good for your spiritual wellbeing, but when you're working to pull a paycheck, you don't get to put your own flights of fancy before things which make your team (not you as an individual performer, but your team as a whole) more effective in achieving business objectives.
Horseshit. Python and Ruby and Lisp are real-world workhorses that don't need tens of millions of dollars in hype to be successful. For instance I have tens of thousands of lines of Python code out on the field doing real work, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for really demanding clients, including governments and advertising agencies. In one case, I finished a project in a third of the time it took three Java programmers - and mine was smaller, faster and more maintainable for the guys who took it over. Time is money and succinctness is power in software development and Java doesn't make the cut on either. Oh sure, it's a great tool to allow development by the lowest common denominator (money quote from James Gosling) but the really smart teams I know despise it for the ugly hack it really is. When I expressed this opinion in a column for a local computing mag, I was assailed with all kinds of outraged squeals from the local Java gurus. But none of them could answer my points honestly.
If readers disagree, answer honestly with words rather than modpoints. I've tried Java. I really have. I found it ugly, slow, anal and seriously limiting to work with. And I don't seem to be allowed to fix flaws in it either. That's not good.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.