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Ruby 1.9.1 Released
Janwedekind writes "Yuki Sonoda yesterday announced the release of Ruby 1.9.1 (Ruby Inside coverage with lots of links). The VM of Ruby 1.9, formerly known as YARV, was initiated by Koichi Sasada and has been in the making for quite some time. Ruby's creator Yukihiro Matsumoto has already presented many of the upcoming features in his keynote at RubyConf 2007. Most notably, Ruby 1.9 now supports native threads and an implementation of fibers. A lot of work also went into encoding awareness of strings. The 1.9.1 version is said to be twice as fast as the stable 1.8.7. It will take some time though until the majority of existing Ruby extensions get ported to 1.9."
Python is skiing and ruby is snow boarding. One's more fun than the other but they are more similar than different.
Choice of programming language actually matters, and dismissing languages you haven't used much is foolhardy. If this isn't obvious to you, this article may prove enlightening.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
No, it really doesn't. What matter is availability of libraries, and your personal profficiency with the language. Given C and a regex library, I'll write better, cleaner, and faster doing string parsing than I would in perl. Why? Because I've used C and C++ every day for the past 8 years. Even though I use and know perl and regex is built into the language, I make more mistakes in it due to using it only a few times a year. And yes, I've actually tried this- I was 5x faster in C with the regex library. Do the test again with a perl maven, and I'm sure the opposite result would occur, even if you gave a problem that's more traditionally a C thing.
Now there are some languages that better suit individual people than other languages, due to the way they approach problems. Lisp is good for people who think very mathematically. C is good for those who think in a very step by step manner. OOP is good for people who think in terms of models and interactions. But you'll always be more efficient in a language you know well than one thats new to you.
Which isn't to say there's no reason to learn a new language- you may find one that fits you a bit better, especially if you learn a new paradigm like functional. But you'll never solve a problem quicker by using a language you aren't as familiar with, unless a library for a major piece of functionality exists in that language but not yours.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Except that slideshow is comparing the performance of popular frameworks for different languages. So they're showing that Rails is an efficient framework. That's a perfectly valid point to make (the language makes it easy to write a better algorithm, or maybe the framework is just more efficient), but it doesn't say anything about how fast the code is executed.
I switched from Perl to Ruby as my everyday sysadmin and glue language, and I use it pretty extensively. I love Ruby, but I won't try to handwave away its faults. In my usage, it's undeniably, dramatically, slower than Perl. We're talking order of magnitude here, not marginal stuff that only shows up in benchmarking.
A script to parse a huge, complex data file sucks ten times as many CPU cycles to do the same work. For what I do, that's OK, because the ten minutes to run the job is completely dwarfed by the development time saved by using a sane language.
It has always been 'fast enough' for appropriate programming problems. If Ruby is too slow, you're in the wrong problem domain to use Ruby.
Note that there is, and can never be, OneTrueLanguage(TM).
Efficient development is all about playing to the advantages of the development tools available to you. Complaining about weaknesses is usually indicative of a lack of understanding.
John_Chalisque
One has to wonder if you actually ski or snowboard. Other than the fact that they are both done on snowy downhill slopes, there is no similarity.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.