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The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance
igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."
Web 2.0 is still gay.
It still has problems wrt performance and variable scoping is still brain-dead. But at least its semantics and syntax suck.
So, it's a bit worse than python with a better designed object model.
The people who say stupid shit like "Ruby is awesome" and "JavaScript is awesome" are the same sort of stupid fuckers who say stuff like "PHP is awesome".
First off, JavaScript is pure shit in every way possible. It's a mid-1990s hack that has been taken way, way, way too far. It's the client-side mistake that's equivalent the the server-side PHP abomination. JavaScript and PHP are both mountains of steaming, worm-infested cow feces.
Ruby is basically dumbed-down Perl. It retains the shitty syntax, but removes the powerful semantics and flexibility that are Perl's only redeeming qualities.
Clearly, Python and Clojure are the way to go these days. Even C# and VB.NET are more respectable languages that JavaScript, Ruby and PHP, and that's pretty fucking sad.
Translation: you can write code and come back in six months and have no fucking idea what it does without a secret decoder ring (ahh.. the phenomenon of write-only code). Add in a heaping helping of syntactic sugar and we're there.
Python is far more readable and maintainable when doing large amounts of code.
Sorry kid, Python is for the pros and Ruby is for the Rails fanbois designing 'leet' sites as web contractors. On more than one occasion I've made fools cry because I broke their scaffolding... but.. we approach the straw man at this juncture.
Who outside of the Ruby and Rails communities honestly gives a crap about the "Ruby Renaissance"? I've worked with Ruby for over a year and a half, and I can say with absolute confidence that the language is horrible. You can flame back to this all you want, the fact remains that it's a slow blob and throwing more hardware at it is a stupid argument. No major VM is going to make it rival the top languages in raw processing power (C/C++/Java even Python). And Rails "automagic" combined with Ruby's inability to report exceptions in a meaninful way (the backtrace is 99% rubbish, and often reports the error in a place where it didn't even occur) leaves you in a state of MURDEROUS RAMPAGE should anything go wrong in your precious RoR app.
As for Ruby in a browser - there's already projects that do that, and do it fairly well. Some of them use Applets, which is where suddenly everyone has a hissie fit. Yeah, using a proprietary Windows-centric tech like Silverlight is a MUUUUCH better option. Please. Or writing a VM in JavaScript? Talk about MOLASSES!
No thank you. If I want to use a quick scripting language with ample flexibility and power, I'll use Groovy, thank you very much. For one thing, Groovy and Grails gives me a LOT more choice as flexibility over RoR any day of the week.
So, Rubyists, have your little childish flames now. I've used it in 3 major projects, right up to Rails 2.3.2, and I've hated it every single time. And don't assume I'm a "n00b" - I've got over 15 years IT experience in more languages that I can list in this comment block.
Faggot, I've had the misfortune of using both JavaScript and Ruby (for web development and scripting) more than you likely ever have, and ever will.
Have you looked at the syntax of Perl and Ruby? The vast similarities should be pretty clear to everyone but the stupidest of mental retards. Look at some Perl code, then look at some Ruby code, and if you honestly can't see the similarity for yourself, then fuck off.
You'll need to use both Ruby and Perl to experience Ruby's weak semantics compared to Perl. Stuff that can be done in literally a fraction of a line of code in Perl can take several lines of Ruby code. That's not a huge difference for a 5 or 10 line scripts, but once you're developing applications with 500,000 lines of code or more, it makes a huge difference.
As for JavaScript, I wrote three custom Firefox plugins for one company. It's unbelievable how fucking stupid the combination of JavaScript and XUL is. It makes development tedious, and debugging it is a huge pain in the ass. Even developing Win16 apps in pure C was more enjoyable, and that's a pretty fucking miserable experience.
Take your significant whitespace piece of crap toylanguage and get the fuck out of here. If you still believe significant whitespace was a brilliant idea look at the steaming pile of number two that is PSP.
Dumbass.
You're a hypocrite. "You're" articulation skills are horrible if you can't even tell the difference between you're and your.
Ruby seems to passe now. It really brings nothing to the table between Perl or Python.
Sadly, I'm just a programmer who has had to deal with far too much JavaScript and Ruby bullshit.
Unlike many people, including yourself, I came to JavaScript after years of programming with much better languages. I don't live in ignorance, and I know there is much better out there. I'm also not afraid to call out shitty languages like Java and Ruby.
That all said, I didn't bother to read more than the first sentence of your post. I know that you're just a college student, and thus I consider your opinion to be worth about as much as the shit the programmer from India left in our office's urinal during his training session.