5 ms·
> Rubyists in general want to use Ruby for everything. Well… why not? This is a relatively objective statement; the problem with ruby tends to be the crappy i
by phillmv 14y ago
> Rubyists in general want to use Ruby for everything.
Well… why not?
This is a relatively objective statement; the problem with ruby tends to be the crappy interpreter we're forced to suffer through - not the language itself. The Ruby language, in my biased opinion, as far as OO-functional languages go is pure awesome.
My initial reaction was: "A Ruby to Obj-C ABI compiler? Fuck no, what is wrong with you."
Upon learning it was the MacRuby dude: "Holy shit fuck yes".
I really don't want to ditch my entire development workflow to pick up Xcode, and Objective C, and miss out on all of the development libraries and vibrant community that I already have access to.
The problem with company led development environments is that they're tailored to the vendor's, and not the community's, needs. Development is rigid and low on innovation.
If this framework is half as good as it seems to be, within a month we'll see a dozen libraries that abstract all sorts of pain away from iOS development. Abstracting the pain away is something the Ruby community tends to do well.
I've gone from being totally uninterested in iOS development to being excited in what I can do inside UIWebviews. Naive, maybe, but it's probably significantly lowered the amount of investment I have to make into creating an iOS app.
- deeds 14y ago> Upon learning it was the MacRuby dude: "Holy shit fuck yes". Couldn't have said it better myself.
- 55pts 14y agoI like ruby but please, do not call it a functional language. Its not even remotely close.
- bigfudge 14y agoWhy not? Sure, neither ruby nor python emphasise immutability, and recursion isn't optimised, but both lend themselves to a functional style if you're so inclined. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/159797/is-ruby-a-functional-language http://stackoverflow.com/questions/159797/is-ruby-a-function...
- Lio 14y agoActually MacRuby does do tail call optimisation (and so does MRI 1.9 if you turn it on).
- spacemanaki 14y agoI think 55pts makes an important distinction: just because it's possible to write programs in a functional style doesn't mean it's a functional language. The answer with the most votes in your SO link sums it up: Ruby is an imperative, OO language, and you can be generous and add that it has first-class functions and lexical closures. But JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP, and C# fall in this category, and maybe Java 8 will too. If they are all "functional languages" then the phrase is meaningless.
- 55pts 14y agoWell said. Functional features do not a functional language make.