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"Ruby is an academic language designed in academia for academic and theoretical problem sets" You make that FUD up yourself? What about Chef, Puppet, writing R

"Ruby is an academic language designed in academia for academic and theoretical problem sets" You make that FUD up yourself? What about Chef, Puppet, writing Ruby scripts for general purpose apps, JRuby (better than Groovy when you can use both jars and gems!), the fact that RedHat's OpenShift (Cloud Hosting of J2EE, etc.) platform depends on Ruby- the list goes on and on.

cookiecaper 14y ago
>You make that FUD up yourself? No. Matz built Ruby because he thought Perl and Python weren't object-oriented enough. This is decidedly an academic concern. Ridiculously, Matz decided to take Perl over Python as the inspiration for most of his syntax, and if you've looked at Ruby code and gotten Perl flashbacks as I have, there's a good reason for it: it's supposed to be like a super object-oriented Perl. If you love Perl then that's great for you, but there is no reason to presume that Ruby has any real-world applicability. It's basically just Matz's opinion on "how Perl ought to be". It seems my timeline was a bit incorrect in that Matz apparently worked for a commercial entity when Ruby was conceived, but in a theoretical division ("head of research"). So perhaps the comment should be altered to "Ruby is an academic language designed for theoretical research applications". It has almost no practical redemptive features as compared to modern Python or Lua, MRI is slow and unusable for memory-intensive applications, the syntax is a jumble of esoteric symbols and inconveniences, and so on. There is really no reason, on either a linguistic or practical engineering basis, to prefer it over other scripting languages. People are, and have been since DHH successfully poured his coat of snake oil out, just jumping on the Rails bandwagon and buying that whole song and dance, which was originally produced to promote DHH's consulting firm. That's not to say some people haven't taken the language and done cool stuff with it, but it's not relevant to the question of the language's individual worthiness.
- hakaaaaak 14y ago
  I use Ruby because it is clear and it is the most practical and effective language I've ever used. I'm glad you like Python. Have fun with it. For others to compare, here are some examples on the c2 wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonVsRubyCodeExamples http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonVsRubyCodeExamples and stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1113611/what-does-ruby-have-that-python-doesnt-and-vice-versa http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1113611/what-does-ruby-ha...

cookiecaper 14y ago

>You make that FUD up yourself? No. Matz built Ruby because he thought Perl and Python weren't object-oriented enough. This is decidedly an academic concern. Ridiculously, Matz decided to take Perl over Python as the inspiration for most of his syntax, and if you've looked at Ruby code and gotten Perl flashbacks as I have, there's a good reason for it: it's supposed to be like a super object-oriented Perl. If you love Perl then that's great for you, but there is no reason to presume that Ruby has any real-world applicability. It's basically just Matz's opinion on "how Perl ought to be". It seems my timeline was a bit incorrect in that Matz apparently worked for a commercial entity when Ruby was conceived, but in a theoretical division ("head of research"). So perhaps the comment should be altered to "Ruby is an academic language designed for theoretical research applications". It has almost no practical redemptive features as compared to modern Python or Lua, MRI is slow and unusable for memory-intensive applications, the syntax is a jumble of esoteric symbols and inconveniences, and so on. There is really no reason, on either a linguistic or practical engineering basis, to prefer it over other scripting languages. People are, and have been since DHH successfully poured his coat of snake oil out, just jumping on the Rails bandwagon and buying that whole song and dance, which was originally produced to promote DHH's consulting firm. That's not to say some people haven't taken the language and done cool stuff with it, but it's not relevant to the question of the language's individual worthiness.

hakaaaaak 14y ago
I use Ruby because it is clear and it is the most practical and effective language I've ever used. I'm glad you like Python. Have fun with it. For others to compare, here are some examples on the c2 wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonVsRubyCodeExamples http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonVsRubyCodeExamples and stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1113611/what-does-ruby-have-that-python-doesnt-and-vice-versa http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1113611/what-does-ruby-ha...