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Owen Densmore

Ruby?

Administrator

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/

Giles Bowkett

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 <owen at backspaces.net> 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

Frank Wimberly

Ruby?

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 wimberly3 at earthlink.net

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] 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 <owen at backspaces.net> wrote:

--
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

Giles Bowkett

Ruby?

I can also stand on my head.

On 10/3/06, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at earthlink.net> 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 wimberly3 at earthlink.net
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: friam-bounces at redfish.com [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] 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 <owen at backspaces.net> 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

Carl Tollander

Ruby?

About Ruby:

>It's flexible like Perl, painstakingly clear like Python (good
> Python), and much more fluid than Java.

So we got 3 qualities, flexibility ( for those who can stand on their
own heads, ow),
clarity (both goodoldfashioned and newandimproved)
and fluidity. What you mean by fluidity's got me somewhat baffled, at
least for language
comparisons. Could you say more?

>(And learn Haskell and OCaml.)

Haskell looks interesting, but the community's relatively small. Any
suggestions for best
way to go about learning it? What would we *use* it for? Might be fun
in any case.

As for OCaml, Lisp and playing with type theories, this might be amusing:
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2006/08/categorifying_cccs_seeing_comp.html
and yes, that's a MathML-enabled blog.

Carl

Giles Bowkett wrote:

> I can also stand on my head.
>
> On 10/3/06, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at earthlink.net> 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 wimberly3 at earthlink.net
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: friam-bounces at redfish.com [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] 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 <owen at backspaces.net> 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

Ruby?

On 10/3/06, Carl Tollander <carl at plektyx.com> wrote:
> What you mean by fluidity's got me somewhat baffled, at
> least for language
> comparisons. Could you say more?

the fluidity is partly the syntax and partly the interactive
interpreter. (lots of languages have those. unfortunately not Java.)
so you know how Strings in Java are immutable? well, I had to split a
string today.

initially all I remembered was the split() function. I figured it
probably ran on spaces. so I go into irb:

"muppet asdf".split

and I get

["muppet", "asdf"]

which is an array. arrays can be indexed by a standard [] array
indexing notation, so I try:

"muppet asdf".split[1]

and it works. I get

"asdf"

so then I do this in the real code:

@thing = Thing.find_by_name(params[:search].split[1])

and it works, but it gives the wrong results, because I forgot, I
didn't need to split on white space, I needed to split on a colon. so
then I go back into irb and emerge two seconds later with the answer:

@thing = Thing.find_by_name(params[:search].split(":")[1])

which was actually the first thing I thought of. that's what's really
fun about it, often the first thing you think of works. part of it is
just that working in a scripting language with an interactive
interpreter flows really easy because there isn't any pausing. Java
clobbers Ruby in performance but Ruby can be more fun.

> >(And learn Haskell and OCaml.)
>
> Haskell looks interesting, but the community's relatively small. Any
> suggestions for best
> way to go about learning it? What would we *use* it for? Might be fun
> in any case.

Well, I'm not sure. It hadn't occurred to me that it might be useful
for something. That's a good question.

> As for OCaml, Lisp and playing with type theories, this might be amusing:
> http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2006/08/categorifying_cccs_seeing_comp.html
> and yes, that's a MathML-enabled blog.

I can't really read math.

--
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org

Carl Tollander

Ruby?

>I can't really read math.

Is not Ruby math?

Owen Densmore

Ruby?

Administrator

In reply to this post by Giles Bowkett

On Oct 3, 2006, at 2:13 PM, Giles Bowkett wrote:
> 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.

Hi Giles. Rails does seem to have hit a sweet spot, from what I hear.

Could you say a bit more about its architecture? I'm not sure what
its all about.

We've used php, servlets, lucene, tomcat, and so on, .. and have
looked at semi-cms type systems like wordpress and textprocessing.
But mainly we've just wrapped up our own "web pipes" so to speak. So
I'm not very clear on what Rails and its similar spin-offs have to
offer.

-- Owen

Owen Densmore 505-988-3787 http://backspaces.net
Redfish Group: 505-995-0206 http://redfish.com http://friam.org/

Giles Bowkett

Ruby?

On 10/5/06, Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net> wrote:

> On Oct 3, 2006, at 2:13 PM, Giles Bowkett wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Hi Giles. Rails does seem to have hit a sweet spot, from what I hear.
>
> Could you say a bit more about its architecture? I'm not sure what
> its all about.
>
> We've used php, servlets, lucene, tomcat, and so on, .. and have
> looked at semi-cms type systems like wordpress and textprocessing.
> But mainly we've just wrapped up our own "web pipes" so to speak. So
> I'm not very clear on what Rails and its similar spin-offs have to
> offer.

It's all about MVC and making everything obvious automatic. Rails sets
up models, views, and controllers in such a way that putting things in
the right place is very intuitive. Good, clean application structure
is very easy to maintain, and anything a million web developers have
had to do before is almost entirely automated.

You can easily use Rails to do all your database development without
ever even looking at SQL. I do this all the time. Database migrations
are handled with a DSL that allows you to specify database design in a
database-agnostic way. So if you upgrade from MySQL to Postgres, for
example, the only thing you have to change is a single line in a
config file. You can have thirty files describing your schema and
alterations to it, and only one line in a config file needs to change.
Similarly, you can roll migrations backwards and forwards, which is
very useful during development, as it allows you to start coding
immediately and change your schema on the fly with zero headaches. You
can even use it to alternate between variations on a schema and
explore the benefits and limitations of each one.

Likewise Rails is set up to autogenerate code for an amazing variety
of things, and it's very easy to modify most autogenerated stuff if
the need arises. So you get a great deal of things done for you, but
anything you need to do yourself, or in an idiosyncratic way, it's
very easy to get in there and do things manually too. It also ships
with a "console", which is like the irb interactive interpreter,
except it also loads all of Rails and your entire application as well.
So you get all the benefits of an interactive interpreter, and you get
to see exactly what your code is doing programmatically. You could in
fact code an entire Web application in the console and not even bother
with the Web at all until you were ready to do the CSS.

It's a gigantic productivity boost. There's a demo where they build a
Flickr search engine with all kinds of Ajax eye candy in the space of
five minutes:

http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/flickr-rails-ajax.mov

Because it's organized so cleanly, building a tiny site takes minutes,
and building something gigantic results in a very neatly partitioned
system which is very, very easy to maintain. That's why it hit the
sweet spot. PHP developers ditch PHP for Rails because it gives them
superior maintainability. Java developers ditch Java for Rails because
they can create their apps much more quickly.

Anyway, sweet spot is definitely the term. Ruby books now outsell both
Perl books and Python books.

--
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org

Owen Densmore

Ruby?

Administrator

On Oct 6, 2006, at 6:04 PM, Giles Bowkett wrote:
> It's all about MVC and making everything obvious automatic. Rails sets
> up models, views, and controllers in such a way that putting things in
> the right place is very intuitive. Good, clean application structure
> is very easy to maintain, and anything a million web developers have
> had to do before is almost entirely automated.
...

Interesting video: Mac using TextMate and the Apache server built
into the standard releases. I'm wondering if the Ruby community is a
bit more Mac-y than others might be.

As cool as Ruby is, and as well as they've chosen the sweet-spot, I'm
wondering if Rails is almost language-agnostic. I'm hearing other
language folks are catching up: Grails for Groovy, TurboGears for
Python, Sails for Java.

So is it Ruby/JRuby .. or is it that the Ruby folks simply built a
great framework, but not one particularly demanding Ruby per se, but
simply the delightful reduction in grief their framework came up
with. Both are creative, but the winner may simply have been the
framework.

That said, its also likely the Ruby mind-set that produced the
framework, one that would be hard to think about in other languages.

This certainly makes clear why Sun hired the Ruby folks over Groovy
or Jython: "Its the server, stupid" .. as Sun would say!

I'm impressed!

-- Owen

Owen Densmore 505-988-3787 http://backspaces.net
Redfish Group: 505-995-0206 http://redfish.com http://friam.org/

Giles Bowkett

Ruby?

> Interesting video: Mac using TextMate and the Apache server built
> into the standard releases. I'm wondering if the Ruby community is a
> bit more Mac-y than others might be.

very much so -- the entire Rails core team is on Macs with TextMate.
very strong Mac preference at work in that community.

> As cool as Ruby is, and as well as they've chosen the sweet-spot, I'm
> wondering if Rails is almost language-agnostic. I'm hearing other
> language folks are catching up: Grails for Groovy, TurboGears for
> Python, Sails for Java.

That's really the question. I know Rails uses Ruby-specific features
in terms of reflection and the flexibility of Ruby's object system,
but whether those features are really necessary, I don't know. I do
know Django existed in Python before Rails did, and the same might be
true of Turbogears, although I'm not sure.

There's a Perl one called Catalyst, too, I went into a project on the
assumption that years and years of Perl experience, plus in-depth
familiarity with Rails, would make working in Catalyst very easy. In
fact I found it massively counterintuitive, so much so that I had to
give up on the project.

(There's another one in Perl called Jifty, which was inspired by the
general attenion on frameworks Rails has inspired, but which also
takes continuations and halos from Seaside. That one looks really
interesting, although Perl today has a stigma so bad you'd almost be
better off coding in Fortran. I got an e-mail once from a recruiter
who had failed to delete stuff forwarded from their manager, which
said "the client wants a senior programmer who's willing to work at a
junior rate because he uses Perl.")

Anyway, I think you're right -- Rails is a definite winner, but Ruby's
role in that success is a good question.

--
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org