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Over the years I've found I've saved the most time less from apps I've found but more the ability to write off-the-cuff single-use Ruby scripts. Whether scrapin

Over the years I've found I've saved the most time less from apps I've found but more the ability to write off-the-cuff single-use Ruby scripts. Whether scraping, renaming, fetching, etc, it can be a huge effort saver.

bigiain 10y ago
Same, except s/Ruby/Perl/ (One of the guys I work with does this with Java - which always seems an odd choice to me. The best sysadmin I've ever worked with did everything in bash, which feels odd to me for opposite reasons (ever seen anyone doing SQL database connections in shell???). But the underlying message holds: "learn and use a programming language, it pretty much doesn't matter which one, whatever you're most comfortable with - and then use it when the simple tools don't work for you...")
- petercooper 10y ago
  I was a Perl developer for 8 years before Ruby and I think it's where I got the habit from - it's a very 'Perl thing' to do! :-) Java does seem an odd choice. I don't disrespect Java, but for very quickly loading in data, making changes, etc, it's going to be far from a few lines I suspect..
  - peteretep 10y ago
    I wonder if people still voluntarily move from Perl to Ruby, other than for financial reasons. I had to dive into Python and Ruby for my dissertation. I didn't like Python, but I completely understood how it would be possible to. Ruby just felt like a less predictable Perl with more immature tooling.
    - krylon 10y ago
      I haven't used Ruby in years, but I used it a lot for toy projects at home, and I recently looked at a few of these, and I was kind of impressed - even after years, and almost without any comments, the code was still very readable and rather beautiful. Ruby can be very elegant and pleasant to use; I have never used it for web applications, though. (At work, I use Perl quite a lot, though. I recently have started trying to use Go for problems I normally use Perl for. But the jury is still out on how well that works.)

bigiain 10y ago

Same, except s/Ruby/Perl/ (One of the guys I work with does this with Java - which always seems an odd choice to me. The best sysadmin I've ever worked with did everything in bash, which feels odd to me for opposite reasons (ever seen anyone doing SQL database connections in shell???). But the underlying message holds: "learn and use a programming language, it pretty much doesn't matter which one, whatever you're most comfortable with - and then use it when the simple tools don't work for you...")

petercooper 10y ago
I was a Perl developer for 8 years before Ruby and I think it's where I got the habit from - it's a very 'Perl thing' to do! :-) Java does seem an odd choice. I don't disrespect Java, but for very quickly loading in data, making changes, etc, it's going to be far from a few lines I suspect..
- peteretep 10y ago
  I wonder if people still voluntarily move from Perl to Ruby, other than for financial reasons. I had to dive into Python and Ruby for my dissertation. I didn't like Python, but I completely understood how it would be possible to. Ruby just felt like a less predictable Perl with more immature tooling.
  - krylon 10y ago
    I haven't used Ruby in years, but I used it a lot for toy projects at home, and I recently looked at a few of these, and I was kind of impressed - even after years, and almost without any comments, the code was still very readable and rather beautiful. Ruby can be very elegant and pleasant to use; I have never used it for web applications, though. (At work, I use Perl quite a lot, though. I recently have started trying to use Go for problems I normally use Perl for. But the jury is still out on how well that works.)