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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.'"
Before I even consider Ruby: is it faster and less memory hungry than Java.
If the answer is no, then I'm not going to waste any effort on it.
moral principles? uh, how much have you donated to charity there, putz? given in the billions have you? i didn't think so. bill has. he's the modern day robin hood. everyone on here should be programming in .net.
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.
Well, fuck you too, buddy. Merry Christmas to your ignorant ass.
I'm sure it's easy to copypaste some strawman argument containing hilarious phrases such as "pointy-haired boss" which the children will find irresistible, since they know nothing about the actual merits of the arguments, having never managed anyone, let alone a group of people who work together to achieve objectives such as saving people's lives, or even less noble objectives such as creating a software platform to aid the collective research efforts of thousands of researchers.
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.
I have used hundreds of thousands of dollars on Python code which the author believed to be really maintainable and work really well, but in the reality-based world turned to be such crap that the whole team, including me, had to work a breakneck pace to rewrite it in Java, which has such incredible features as working threading support, no Global Interpreter Lock, actual Oracle and LDAP support that doesn't leak memory like anything, and isn't 20 times slower than the Oracle and LDAP support in other languages, no monkey patches (oh yeah, Python coders seem to think that it's SUCH a good idea to monkeypatch others' code, since after all, SMART people should know without any documentation what's going on, and documentating code is useless anyway, people should just go in and read all of those millions of lines of code if they want to know what's going on) and, you know, clear and accurate documentation and HORDES of pre-existing components which make your life so much easier, if only you're not infected with the dreaded Python community NIH disease.
Java does have an additional useful feature: because of its mandatory coding practises and standards it's pretty easy to spot when an amateur has written something really broken, and contain the problem to those components which the amateur has touched. Perhaps this is what has happened to you?
I've used, in production, Python, Perl, C, C++, Pascal, Java, x86 assembly, a little AutoLisp, and so on. Hundreds of thousands of lines. (The C code I have out there is pretty crappy, for which I apologise, but I was an amateur and thought of my work much as you seem to think now.) Since I'm now a professional, I don't fucking connect programming language tools to my personal or professional identity. It's a real bad idea to do so, if you want to remain, or become, a professional.
Working in teams means that you can't just think what's right for you right now, you have to think of what's good for the team on the long run. Sometimes managers are wrong in their decisions about which path to take, but after you've tried the Python path, it quickly shows itself to be one of the paths that's pretty easy to just rule out because of its obvious defects. Like Pascal is, for different reasons.
Perhaps it's time for you to grow up too, buddy, and understand that the world doesn't revolve around you and what you want. Wishing things don't make them true. Different things are true to different people with different backgrounds.
KISS doesn't just mean "least code" or "least rows" or "least symbols."
If it doens't support distributed transactions, it's not simple, because it just can't be an integral part of so many applications. Which means that the investment you make in this piece of software is mostly wasted, while a larger investment in a piece of software which DOES support XA is muc