Ruby 1.9.0 Released

sciurus0 writes "The 1.9.0 development version of the Ruby programming language has been released. This version has many changes, including a new virtual machine that provides great speed improvements."

Comments

Re:Why Ruby?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any reason why I should give Ruby a try?

Speaking as a ruby developer, if you're happy with python - not really! Python's also great. It's just a matter of which suits your style. Personally, I couldn't get over Python's syntactically significant whitespace - many people would laugh at that, but for me it's just unthinkable. So Python was just ruled out for me totally because of that.

Python and Ruby are both competing to be the most beautiful next-gen languages .. but beauty's in the eye of the beholder. I've found mine, and it sounds a lot like you've found yours. So .. that was the long way to say, again, "not really" ! : )

Re:Scalability?

[JanneM]

Ruby is not a web development language. It is a general scripting language, like Perl or Python. You still seem to conflate the language with the specific use case of Rails - dynamic website scripting.

I use it heavily as my general scripting language; where I would have used Perl for small utilities, file munging or what have you before, I now use Ruby. Not because Perl is bad - it isn't - but Ruby really is in many respects Perl done right, with many of the benefits and without the syntactic quirkiness. Scaling just isn't a factor for most uses of a script language.

Different style of programming

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Alright, I know this is going to be flame fodder, but I'm genuinely curious: does Ruby have anything to offer for someone who's already very proficient in Python (and Django, so Rails is already covered)?

If you look at it from a features and libraries perspective, then you really won't find much different. But you shouldn't look at it that way.

There's a significant programming style difference between the Python and Ruby communities. Python programmers, as a general rule, tend to be more inclined toward imperative programming, while Ruby has much more of the feel of a multi-paradigm language. To understand a lot of Ruby code out there, you need to wrap your head around concepts like functional programming, metaprogramming, and domain-specific languages. Ruby code tends favor higher-order functional combinators over primitive looping syntax (an influence from functional programming), extending the system base classes extensively (an influence from Smalltalk), and a lot of it has the flavor of trying to extend the language to look more like the problem space itself (domain-specific languages; look at something like rake, for example).

Python aims to be "clean" in a very contentious sense of "clean." To put it in a way that will be taken very partisanly: Python is the language that you get when "clean and easy to understand" is taken to mean "only promotes the concepts that are easy to understand to a mediocre imperative programmer." For example, Guido is on the record that higher-order functions like reduce are supposedly hard to understand.

To be fair, yeah, Python is a reasonably clean imperative/OOP dynamic language, which is no mean feat, but many of us folks really would rather have a language that supports a broader range of programming paradigms. (Though I'm not as great of a fan of Ruby as I used to be before I got going on Scheme, I must say...)

Re:Why Ruby?

[Just Some Guy]

Ouch. Try this one:

>>> a
{1: 2, 'foo': 'bar'}
>>> b
{3: 4, 'foo': 'qux'}
>>> dict(a.items() + b.items())
{3: 4, 1: 2, 'foo': 'qux'}

It scales easily (add "+ c.items()" to mix in another dict) and doesn't have any restriction's on the keys' datatypes.