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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.'"
I love it how the Rails fanatics always take great personal insult at even the mere suggestion that code generation isn't its strong point. Even though, surprise surprise, the infamous tutorial video advertises just this very feature throughout pretty much the entire clip. It's like watching a little kid cry and stamp their feet at a grocery store trying to get their parents to buy them cereal.
If speed and memory usage is your only criteria when choosing a language, why not use C or assembly?
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Ruby is useless to me because it has no unicode support.
e st=all&lang=java&lang2=ruby&sort=fullcpu
In this shootout it was found that Ruby had lower memory consumption, but also ran much more slowly than Java:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/benchmark.php?t
You just have to love java programmers making the easy more difficult. What I have learned in managing developers is that you have to constantly fight their desire to make things more complicated without a valid reason for doing so.
He's correct that certain tasks are easier in Ruby than in java, not to mention that the code is more readable. But he is missing in my opinion the most important part of Rails and that the ORM. Use scaffolding or don't use it. But if you bypass Active Record you're just making more work for yourself.
Man Holmes
Congratulations Java, you've finally proven yourself as the new Benchmark(TM). Enjoy a lifetime of groundless belittlement.
By the way, if moreover isn't on this list, it sure ought to be. Over.
...is a good guy to write this sort of thing since he's been programming Java for a long time and has also branched out into "dynamic Java" things like Groovy. He's done a bunch of stuff on dbUnit (including a dbUnit chapter in Java Testing Patterns), too. So he's had enough experience with Java to know what's what.
I'm probably biased, though, since Andy also wrote the CPD Ant task.
The Army reading list
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
I've often heard comparisons of .Net to Java and for a while there it seemed to me like they were two separate but somewhat equal development environments. Now it seems that several languages/environments have been coming up (PHP/Ruby) and many articles I see compare it to Java or explain how it's competing with Java.
.Net doesn't seem to have such competition?
What does the future hold in terms of what environment will "come out on top" when Java seems to be compared to or even competing against so many languages while
I'm a big tall mofo.
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.
I'm doubtful. I bump up against the limitations of Java every other day, and it seems like the only way you could get around such things is with an awful lot of code generation.
For instance, I was recently writing a Java class to convert an XML DOM into a custom object tree. This largely involved writing getters and setters, and for loops to iterate over NodeLists to pull out descendant elements. I couldn't help thinking that with Ruby, I could have written "has_attributes" and "has_descendants" methods, and generated the getters and setters and DOM handling automatically. Instead of my classes being 50 lines apiece, they could have just been 4. It would have taken me far less time in Ruby than I did in Java, because Java hasn't got metaclass-like abilities like Ruby or Python.
Rails as has been said, is a framework. Ruby is the language, and all rails is just ruby with a design in place to make it easier. Some great tools for using rails are becoming available though, due to its increasing user-base. A lot of people are still "trying it, and going back to php" but its got a core user group now and that's what counts.
Given the number of posts in java.net and slashdot on how Ruby is the greatest thing of all (and no mention at all of any negative side) I start wondering why is Ruby desperate to move Java programmers from Java to Ruby
Personally I do not trust a language that has no negatives sides (or at least the Ruby people seems to think so), until it becomes clear what is the other side of Ruby I am not going to use it.
(Yes, I have visited the Ruby website)
StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(s);
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