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Move Over AJAX, Make Room for ARAX
sasserstyl writes "eWeek reports that Microsoft's Silverlight platform will support Ruby client-side scripting, enabling ARAX — or Asynchronous Ruby and XML. Would be cool to have the option to script client-side in something other than Javascript. 'In essence, using ARAX, Ruby developers would not have to go through the machinations of using something like the RJS (Ruby JavaScript) utility, where they write Ruby code and RJS generates JavaScript code to run on the client, Lam said. "Sure, you could do it that way, but then at some point you might have to add some JavaScript code that adds some custom functionality on the client yourself," he said. "So there's always that sense of, 'Now I'm in another world. And wouldn't it be nice if I have this utility class I wrote in Ruby...' Today if I want to use it in the browser I have to port it to JavaScript. Now I can just run it in the browser."'"
If they extinguished it, who would notice? Seriously -- I'm not trying to troll. WTF is Ruby and what is so great about it? It just seems like Java for people who hate Java from what little research I've done on it, but it also seems to be very popular (of course, hating Java is popular, too).
Can someone please tell me?
Weak security because of dynamic typing? You really have to elaborate on this, because like this it just makes no sense. How is a strong typed languare more secure than a dynamic typed one?
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
Its syntax isn't like C? Cry me a river. Sure, the syntax could have been made more c-like (braces instead of do/end - and you can use braces if you like anyway) but the syntax isn't where you get the benefit of ruby.
The most important thing that Ruby has done, in my mind, is to make blocks, closures, and runtime metaprogramming mainstream. So while the syntax may not add much, the language features add a hell of a lot. After writing code in C and Java for a number of years, switching over to Ruby took me all of a week.
That being said, the supposed productivity gains are mostly hype, because you end up spending the time you gained in writing the code to begin with having to write a lot more integration tests to ensure correctness for things that the compiler deals with in a typesafe language.
Rails has been pretty important insofar as it's given a kick in the ass to a bunch of other languages. I agree though that the implementation is a bit of a nightmare, and the lack of built-in dependency injection is a hassle.