The list of ruby success stories page in ruby-lang.org is really lame.
compared to python success stories link this looks very weak.
i think this should be removed till the list looks a bit more impressive
Is there something wrong with people succeeding with Ruby, even in
the smallest way? It may seem so, but not all of us are in an epic
battle with the Python community. Just because NASA uses some Python
code, doesn’t mean we are less superior in our own ways either. In
fact, “NASA uses Python!” seems more like a marketing thing, not a
motivation factor that inspires people with fun and successful
programming.
I create a small method
def counting(p1,p2)
p1 = p1 + 1
p2 = p2 + 2
return p1,p2
end
sum-by-1s=0
sum-by-2s=0
while line = gets
need driver test the method
line=line.chop
sum-by-1s, sum-by-2s = counting(sum-by-1s,sum-by-2s)
end
The method works. I am using PickAxe as my reference.
I don’t recall see any thing stating you could assign values in an array
to variables by separating the variables by commas on the leftside of
the
assignment statement. I just want to know which book or reference
should I use to
understand why assignments can be made in this way?
Or am I just seeing a side effect of my poor coding skills?
Thank you,
Raymond
On 1/5/07, Jacob, Raymond A Jr [email protected] wrote:
I create a small method
def counting(p1,p2)
p1 = p1 + 1
p2 = p2 + 2
return p1,p2
end
A bit offtopic: you can shorten this to:
def counting(p1,p2)
p1 += 1 # x += y is the same as x = x + y
p2 += 2
return p1,p2
end
or
or even
def counting(p1,p2)
return p1 + 1, p2 + 2
end
sum-by-1s=0
sum-by-2s=0
while line = gets
# need driver test the method
line=line.chop
sum-by-1s, sum-by-2s = counting(sum-by-1s,sum-by-2s)
end
I don’t think sum-by-1s is a good variable name. You can’t use - in a
name. It’s reserved for minus. Names are made of A…Z, a…z, 0…9, @
and _.
The method works. I am using PickAxe as my reference.
I don’t recall see any thing stating you could assign values in an array
to variables by separating the variables by commas on the leftside of
the
assignment statement. I just want to know which book or reference
should I use to
understand why assignments can be made in this way?
Or am I just seeing a side effect of my poor coding skills?
This is normal. See the link below. It’s used in block parameters as
well
i.e.: you can do [[1,2],[3,4]].each {|a| … } or [[1,2],[3,4]].each
{|a,b| … }
in the former case you’ll get [1,2] and [3,4] for a, in the latter
a=1,3 and b=2,4.
http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/tut_expressions.html#UC
On 1/5/07, Rahul [email protected] wrote:
The list of ruby success stories page in ruby-lang.org is really lame.
compared to python success stories link this looks very weak.
i think this should be removed till the list looks a bit more impressive
What would make it more impressive? I think this is a very subjective
topic, and I think comparisons between other languages are an
insufficient metric for determining whether the resource is helpful or
not.
Hi –
On Sat, 6 Jan 2007, Rahul wrote:
The list of ruby success stories page in ruby-lang.org is really lame.
compared to python success stories link this looks very weak.
i think this should be removed till the list looks a bit more impressive
It’s supposed to be informative, not impressive. Perhaps people can
report their success stories and the page can be updated.
David
On 1/5/07, Rahul [email protected] wrote:
I think it looks good. This is not to say that I do not respect your POV,
just to give mine
Most of us, if I interpret the posts correctly, do not see Ruby
competing
with other languages.
-Ofun
Cheers
Robert
–
“The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution
hasn’t started yet. Don’t be misled by the enormous flow of money into
bad
defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of
incomplete ideas.”
- Alan Kay
On Jan 5, 2007, at 1:17 PM, Jacob, Raymond A Jr wrote:
I create a small method […]
Please don’t hijack threads. Start a new one instead of replying to
something completely unrelated.
Thank you,
raymond
The method works. I am using PickAxe as my reference.
I don’t recall see any thing stating you could assign values in an array
to variables by separating the variables by commas on the leftside of
the
assignment statement. I just want to know which book or reference
should I use to
understand why assignments can be made in this way?
Or am I just seeing a side effect of my poor coding skills?
I guess you are seeing the effect of not reading the book carefully
enough.
PickAxe, 2nd edition (paper version):
Page 91 ‘Assignment’
Page 92 ‘Parallel Assignment’
Page 338 ‘More on Assignment’
Page 340 ‘Parallel Assignment’
Jeremy McAnally wrote:
I think these sorts of things are what sell to people in management
honestly. For example, I’ve been working on selling Ruby/Rails to my
superiors here on campus. They’re very security and stability
conscience, so mentioning anything other than PHP for the website and
Java for application software is pretty much out of the question. The
first question out of their mouth was “Who else is using it? We’re
not going to use it unless it’s been proven.” Point blank.
They don’t trust their technical people to make assessments of
development tools? PHP + security concerns = severe cognitive
dissonance.
Now, if I were a ruby newbie who just learned the language and wanted
to use it, then I would’ve been stuck.
But in such a case you probably shouldn’t using Ruby for production
development.
discouraged if theres no evidence of it actually being used. I hear
this a lot from people who are interested in learning laguages like
Haskell, but don’t see any practical value in it since they’re not
going to use it outside of a hobby.
People interested in the craft of software development will learn
languages for the sake of learning new concepts. I’d much rather see a
slower growth of the Ruby community than try to draw people in who will
only pursue Ruby if they think it offers gainful employment or some
“non-hobby” use.
Trying to “sell” a language by tossing out showpiece success stories or
prospects of corporate employment is of limited value. People so
persuaded by this are just as likely to jump to the next New Hot Thing
in a year or so.
Why be concerned over Ruby’s popularity? Or, at least, why be concerned
with making Ruby popular among people who don’t have the wherewithal or
motivation to properly assess it? Will it cultivate a strong, lasting
Ruby community?
Someone choosing Ruby for production development had better be sure of
the value and risks, which are not apparent from one-page success
stories. I’d prefer someone not use Ruby at all rather than use Ruby
with mistaken expectations, fail, then blame the language.
–
James B.
“I often work by avoidance.”
- Brian Eno
Jeremy McAnally wrote:
On 1/6/07, James B. [email protected] wrote:
But in such a case you probably shouldn’t using Ruby for production
development.Then how do we get better? How do we gain applicable, real-world
programming skills if we never step out and say, “I’m going to use
this for something meaningful”?
See rubyforge.org
When I started with Ruby in 2001 or so, I was coding Java, and some
Perl. There’s no way I would have tried to get Ruby into a prime-time
slot without more experience. I was working at a company were tech
leads were paid lip service, and J2EE rules the day (partly due, I
think, to superficial “success stories” claiming vast gains).
So I started using Ruby for whatever I could think of that would be fun
and interesting, on my own time.
I left that job by the end of the year. I realize not everyone has that
option, but I knew that the company was not one of the things I had the
power to change, and life’s too short to sit a cube and be bored.
interested in the craft of software development, but I’m also
interested in being able to eat. I would rather spend my time
learning a langauge that is possibly useful to me in a work
environment AND enriching…they are not mututally exclusive concepts.
Of course; I’m in the same boat But I’m skeptical that it is the role
of ruby-lang.org to help people get work.
A year or two ago, Curt H. started a “Why Ruby?” project on
rubyforge.org. It was largely a collection of presentations meant to
explain essential features of Ruby to developers and/or managers.
That collection was eventually moved over to ruby-doc.org. It’s pretty
much remained unchanged since then. If Ruby advocacy is a useful
pursuit, it may be better served by its own site run by people with the
time and motivation to look after it.
–
James B.
“Take eloquence and wring its neck.”
- Paul Verlaine
Jeremy McAnally wrote:
+1 for “Who uses Ruby?” or “Who’s using Ruby?” or any variant thereof.
Yes.
It could be useful to show the range of uses people find for Ruby.
There are some number of people who conflate Ruby with Rails, and
believe that Ruby is unsuitable unless you are building a very
particular type of mid-sized Web site.
–
James B.
http://www.ruby-doc.org - Ruby Help & Documentation
http://beginningruby.com - Beginning Ruby: The Online Book
http://www.rubystuff.com - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff
http://www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys
On 1/5/07, Bryan W. [email protected] wrote:
On 1/5/07, James B. [email protected] wrote:
What is the purpose of having these at all?
I think the primary purpose is to sell the language to a complete layman.
A valid question is whether that is worthwhile or not. Of course,
it’s a good thing to point a layman to if said layman is a potential
employer and you want to work with Ruby.
That having been said, creating your own mini-success story is much
more effective.
So I’m not really sure how I feel on the matter.
That’s a pretty narrow view of how managers and employees (or customers
and contractors) relate as people within an organization. There’s an
awful lot of literature about this, some good and some bad, and one can
choose to take a cynical view or one can choose to learn the better
ways. My point is that you choose your attitude – it is not defined
for you by anyone else.
No, really that’s how we operate. Stop by some time and I’ll show
you. 
It’s not the best job, but my and my colleague’s opinions are
not taken very seriously, even though we’re the professionals. It’s
the pointy haired boss syndrome (PHBS). 
Meaningful to whom? I learned Laplace transforms in graduate school
because they were interesting and because they might or might not be
useful to me some day. I learned sales and marketing for the same
reason. And I’m learning Ruby for the same reason. I’m not going to
demand that anyone pay me to program in Ruby, but it gives me another
option. There are starting to be opportunities for Ruby programmers,
especially Rails developers. So go ahead and learn Ruby and Rails, but
also learn networking skills and sales skills too, because ultimately
that’s how you will make your learnings meaningful.
But everyone has their own reasons for learning, no? Some people can
already use Ruby skills if they have them; I had an opportunity to do
that here. I piddled around with this or that project, but to really
make sure I could use Ruby, I just had to use it. Plain and simple.
I really think this is a diffrn’t strokes for diffrn’t folks kind of
issue.
But what we can do is network, and I think we are doing that. And
for what it’s worth, I do think a web page with Ruby success stories has
value, as long as everyone realizes that it is only part of an overall
marketing plan.
Oh, of course! But I think for a lot of people (ones that I’ve
encountered) that’s a big part. For some people, language features
matter, for some the toolkit, and for others its success in “the real
world.” As I’ve said before, it can be used to install even just a
little trust in ruby (and sometimes that’s all that’s needed).
Well … I encourage you to pursue Ruby even if it currently isn’t
paying the bills. And go find situations where what they are doing isn’t
good enough.
Haha it definitely isn’t paying the bills right now, but I’m in a
situation right now where I can learn it and apply it without a
problem on my own time. I wasnt in that situation a couple of years
ago. 
I’m hoping that in another couple of years…it will pay the
bills…and it will be in a place that is vital and always looking for
things that aren’t good enough.
–
My free Ruby e-book:
http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/book/
My blogs:
On Jan 5, 2007, at 6:17 PM, Jeremy McAnally wrote:
I think these sorts of things are what sell to people in management
honestly. For example, I’ve been working on selling Ruby/Rails to my
superiors here on campus.
Awesome, then you are the perfect guy to help us improve this section
of the site.
I think it’s pretty important; I’m just not sure that a
fat list of links is the best way to present it.
I’m sure we would be open to new ideas. Mock something up and show
us. If you find something we can all get behind, I will put it up.
James Edward G. II
Jeremy McAnally wrote:
I think these sorts of things are what sell to people in management
honestly. For example, I’ve been working on selling Ruby/Rails to my
superiors here on campus. They’re very security and stability
conscience, so mentioning anything other than PHP for the website and
Java for application software is pretty much out of the question. The
first question out of their mouth was “Who else is using it? We’re
not going to use it unless it’s been proven.” Point blank.
I whole-heartedly agree. Success stories like one I heard on
http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/josh_shairbaum_and_dan_manges
about Ruby being used in JPMorgan Chase are just the thing we need more
of. That and solid, impartial code reviews based on benchmarks and
security audits. Anyone up for hosting a break-into-my-rails-server
contest?
There is another rather large company that won an innovation award
recently and Ruby was a key part of it. I have been looking all over
for that again. I was hoping to find it on the Ruby success stories
page but to no avail.
To what degree does blogger.com use Ruby? Our many of our blogs
actually powered there by rails on the backend? I’ve read the following
quote a dozen times wondering that:
“After researching the market, Ruby on Rails stood out as the
best choice. We have been very happy with that decision. We
will continue building on Rails and consider it a key business
advantage.”
-Evan Williams, Creator of Blogger and ODEO
Having a success stories page is something of a two-bladed sword,
however. If it isn’t kept current or lacks content having the page can
leave one with a “that’s it” feeling. Many of the very large successes
within the enterprise, I fear, will never be outed simple because of
the competitive and legal encumberances most enterprise Ruby users have
to face. I’m betting there are a lot of international success stories
also that are not being noticed.
Perl provides an interesting comparison here. It didn’t and doesn’t
need a success stories page because it has always held so much together
that is hard to quantify. Unfortunately, like Ruby, I bet some large
companies would even be ashamed to admit they are using either of these
dynamic languages the way they are. It’s like everyone’s dirty little
secret. Somehow they are still falsely viewed as toy languages or
something to glue together real applications. Ruby and Perl users
seem to be fighting those same stigmas. Python, however, seems to have
somehow overcome that in my experience, although I haven’t a clue how.
It amazes me that people see PHP as a stable language, anyone who
does has never watched the 1.4 stuff put memory through the roof. Same
goes for Java, whose now long corrected crappy JVM burned me real bad
in 97 with faulty hand-off of threads when run from a servlet engine.
In those cases the marketing train seems to run right over any
concerns. Companies are more than happy to boast about Java because of
the perception of stability and maturity it enjoys, which after some
10+ years of corporate adoption and tweeking it may finally deserve
despite how horrible the language itself can be. [Can you believe there
are still no closures? And generics? What’s the deal, trying to be a
pseudo-dynamic language? Although I must disclose I only know generics
from reading and hearing about them.]
One thing I think all the communities will agree on though, Ruby is
here to stay in a big way.
Could it be the one true language bringing balance and restoring peace
to the smalltalkers, lispers, pylons, perl mongers and java drones?
Nah. But you can’t ignore the download numbers, usage statistics,
newsgroup postings, and anecdotal water-cooler research. Ruby is
infecting intelligent minds everywhere.
Notable stories that should be added that I’m aware of:
- Amazon’s UnSpun
- Ara Howard at the NOAA uses Ruby a lot
I don’t think we need to dilute the page the way Python has done;
there are a lot of companies and people in there I’ve never heard of,
so their story means very little to me unless it’s a tale of harrowing
programming adventure (which most of them aren’t).
I think the page we have now is significant, but maybe needs to look
less like a list and more like a narrative outlining some of the
success stories. When I pop open both the Python and Ruby success
stories pages, all I see are links. I’ve looked at the Ruby one
before, but glossed over it because there was nothing compelling about
it. Maybe the content should stay but be presented in a more
interesting way?
–Jeremy
On 1/5/07, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:
Q. Where can I get Ruby/Rails on-site training, consulting, coaching?
A. Ruby Power and Light, LLC (http://www.rubypal.com)
–
My free Ruby e-book:
http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/book/
My blogs:
James B. wrote:
Why be concerned over Ruby’s popularity? Or, at least, why be
concerned with making Ruby popular among people who don’t have the
wherewithal or motivation to properly assess it? Will it cultivate a
strong, lasting Ruby community?Someone choosing Ruby for production development had better be sure of
the value and risks, which are not apparent from one-page success
stories. I’d prefer someone not use Ruby at all rather than use Ruby
with mistaken expectations, fail, then blame the language.
Well put, James! I would like to add something, though. There seems to
be a fair amount of interest on this list, as could be expected, in
“selling Ruby”. I spent ten years of my career in technology sales and
marketing, and if you haven’t been there, it’s really easy to assume
that what works for Ginsu knives or real estate or insurance also works
for something like enterprise infrastructure components, like web
frameworks, scripting languages, performance monitoring packages, or
servers.
I’ve already posted two excellent resources about sales in another
thread, but I think I’ll repeat them here. Of all the thousands of books
about sales, these two authors are the closest I’ve found to “what
really works and why it works” for selling technology into the
enterprise.
Sharon Drew Morgen: http://www.newsalesparadigm.com
Jeff Thull: http://www.primeresource.com/
–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.
James B. wrote:
People interested in the craft of software development will learn
languages for the sake of learning new concepts. I’d much rather see a
slower growth of the Ruby community than try to draw people in who will
only pursue Ruby if they think it offers gainful employment or some
“non-hobby” use.Trying to “sell” a language by tossing out showpiece success stories or
prospects of corporate employment is of limited value. People so
persuaded by this are just as likely to jump to the next New Hot Thing
in a year or so.
I agree for anyone convinced by the stories alone. I never
interpreted ‘success stories’ to translate to ‘you can make money with
this language’. Perhaps the word ‘success’ is the problem.
Like others I see a ‘Who’s using Ruby’ as more a means to combat PHBS
(which exists in the biggest of technical shops) and to help get the
creative “what if” juices going.
I know it sounds childish, but the phrase “…but X is using Ruby”
really carries weight sometimes when it shouldn’t. Responsible
technologists will only pull this out after real review of the
technology, whether it be “Hot” at the time or not.
Why be concerned over Ruby’s popularity?
Mindshare is important to any community. It just is. I know it is
getting crowded but having lack of mindshare is definitely a worse
problem.
I am encouraged by the number of young people whom I know locally who
are considering technology careers not just for the money, but for the
enjoyment they are getting out of programming–largely from the Rails
phenomenon. I have also read students who post who hate programming
in Java. Ruby keeps them motivated.
[BTW, I still think they should learn Java for the same reason I am
forcing myself to learn some .Net. I agree with what I’ve heard Chad
say in podcasts, “you should learn a new language every year,
particularly one you don’t like” for the mind-opening excercise that
is.]
Or, at least, why be concerned
with making Ruby popular among people who don’t have the wherewithal or
motivation to properly assess it? Will it cultivate a strong, lasting
Ruby community?
I don’t know that such people would ever consider themselves part of
the community. Do techno-decision makers mandating Java versions of
anything belong to the Java community? Not unless there is a ‘buzzword’
subclass.
Someone choosing Ruby for production development had better be sure of
the value and risks, which are not apparent from one-page success
stories. I’d prefer someone not use Ruby at all rather than use Ruby
with mistaken expectations, fail, then blame the language.
Amen and amen! Boy I hope everyone reads that.
Over zealous evangelists with their auto-defend set too high hurt more
than help with their foolish “it’s been fine for 10 years” posts
suggesting no further scrutiny is needed.
But, again, after review the “it’s been fine for 10 years” does sound
nice to that doesnt-know-hes-pointy-haired, hasnt-coded-in-three-years,
technology-picking, senior “Distinguished Engineer.” Too often having
to sell a perception is our reality even after we know the truth. The
danger is not learning the truth before pitching the perception.