I can also stand on my head. On 10/3/06, Frank Wimberly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Talk about showoffs. Count the number of languages you mention in this > mail. I've heard of Java. > > Frank > > --- > Frank C. Wimberly > 140 Calle Ojo Feliz (505) 995-8715 or (505) 670-9918 (cell) > Santa Fe, NM 87505 [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Giles Bowkett > Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 2:14 PM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Ruby? > > I'm using it with Rails. Regular Ruby; I know the JRuby guys got hired > by Sun. Rails is the main thing I do these days. > > Thing I'm working on at the moment is a sort of scientific > visualization thingy in Rails and Flash. Pretty basic by Redfish > standards, probably, it's also under a fairly paranoid NDA, but long > story short, node graphs in Flash, with Rails storing and processing > the data, JavaScript proxying it into Flash, and ActionScript doing > the graphing bit. > > I worked on a screenscraper in Ruby recently, too, but the best > screenscraper library to my knowledge is Beautiful Soup, in Python. > The main guy on the thing was a Rails guy who didn't want to learn > Python, so after we benchmarked the Ruby port Rubyful Soup and found > it ten times slower than Beautiful Soup, he hunted down a Ruby > screenscraper called WWW::Mechanize which had comparable performance. > We set that up with Juggernaut, actually, which is the open-source > version of Armageddon, the Comet thing which the Rails guys never got > around to releasing. > > I also wrote some music-generating code in Ruby, that was pretty cool. > I did a little presentation on that at the Ruby Users Group in > Albuquerque. That was for a music class, and to learn the language > better. > > The main reason I'm using it at the moment is because six months ago I > was all gung-ho about it and went and scared up a bunch of work. Now I > actually just want to learn Smalltalk and Seaside, and maybe play > around with Lisp and Python some more. (And learn Haskell and OCaml.) > > There are definite moments of joy when coding Rails, definite moments > of "wow that's elegant!" Sometimes they're due to Rails, sometimes > Ruby, but they're definitely in there. Also, the productivity is > pretty incredible. A novice Rails coder can probably get a site going > quicker than an expert in almost any other language or framework, > except for Smalltalk/Seaside. It makes for extremely fast development. > > There are downsides too. The main problem from my point of view is > that a lot of it is too easy, and there are only a few times when you > get to do something really weird or challenging. I'm enjoying it, > though. When you have to do something unusual, it definitely shines. > It's flexible like Perl, painstakingly clear like Python (good > Python), and much more fluid than Java. Performance is not so good, it > can be utterly sluggish. Java completely annihilates Ruby when it > comes to performance. The biggest upside is probably that you can do > the sort of chaining Lisp coders brag about, but with a dot syntax. > Ruby closures are pretty great, too, even though they're almost just > syntactic sugar. > > In fact, I would probably be perfectly satisfied with Ruby on every > count if it weren't for Seaside. Rails is the Post-It of web > development, so good you can't understand why nobody ever thought of > it before and you can't imagine going back. But when Rails first got > demoed at a Ruby conference, the presenter said, "I challenge anyone > here to put a web app together quicker or more elegantly," and Avi > Bryant, the creator of Seaside, immediately raised his hand. "OK," the > presenter said, "Any of you except Avi." I need to learn more about > Seaside before I can say for sure but it does appear to be even > better. > > On 10/1/06, Owen Densmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Just curious: who of us is using Ruby/JRuby? How? Why? > > > > -- Owen > > > > Owen Densmore 505-988-3787 http://backspaces.net > > Redfish Group: 505-995-0206 http://redfish.com http://friam.org/ > > > > > > > > > > ============================================================ > > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > > > > > -- > Giles Bowkett > http://www.gilesgoatboy.org > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >
-- Giles Bowkett http://www.gilesgoatboy.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
