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2007: Ruby
June 6, 2007
While Meredith was writing her level 2 CFA exam this past weekend, I had the chance to dig into the first 100 pages of Programming Ruby. I figure it makes sense to try and do a good job learning Ruby first before learning Ruby on Rails.
Admitedly, I'm very split minded about Ruby right now, sort of like I am about Perl: There are a lot of things that I really like, but there are also some things that make me cringe. Here are some things that I like/dislike so far.
The good:
 | Ruby is very object oriented, which makes for a clean namespace. One of my complaints about PHP (and Perl) is that they are function-oriented, and so you get these somewhat long, hard to remember function names. For example, PHP has: file_get_contents, simplexml_load_file, strtotime, etc. |
| Ruby is very good at reducing how much the developer has to type. This is one of my gripes about Java, but also C++ to a certain extent: In many places they are wordy and bloated. For instance, in C++: |
| Words Words;
Words::iterator Iter;
for ( Iter = Words.begin() ;
Iter != Words.end() ;
Iter++ )
{
cout << *Iter;
} |
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In Ruby:
| words.each {|word| puts word} |
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The bad:
| Major complaint: Everything that I've read has indicated that Ruby is slow. Not just slow, dog slow :( |
| Ruby's code block construct is fascinating, but it feels a bit unnatural. It will take some time before I have a better feeling for whether I like or dislike code blocks. |
| Related point: Ruby accomplishes a lot by levereging its object oriented namespace and being clever with the code block construct. But this results in a bit of an unnatural style that doesn't mimick natural language that well. For instance: |
| | words.each {|word| puts word} |
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... is not as natural in form as Perl's...
for each $word (@words)
{
print "$word\n";
} |
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April 12, 2007
Last week I picked up Programming Ruby at Chapters, and this week I lucked out by getting Agile Web Development with Rails for free from Scott at work since he had an updated version of the book. I can't wait wait to dive in -- hopefully this language lives up to all of the hype. I'm optimistic.
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