Chad P. wrote:
I can’t remember the last time I used a case statement. It was probably
in the mid 1970s in FORTRAN. And R programmers don’t tend to use as many
control structures as other language programmers do, favoring instead
the built in vector logical and indexing operators.
But I already know Perl … my original comment was that I needed to
unlearn it to learn Ruby. It’s mostly syntactic – curly braces,
semicolons, scalars beginning with dollar signs, etc. I never liked
the Perl dollar sign/at sign/percent sign syntax convention.. . . and my point is that you shouldn’t have to “unlearn Perl”, and I
find it shortsighted and narrow to make that kind of statement with any
seriousness.
No … I don’t have to unlearn the parts of Perl that are common to
Ruby. I do have to unlearn putting semicolons at the end of every
statement, using curly braces for blocks, using tabs for indentation
instead of spaces, and starting an ordinary scalar working variable with
a dollar sign. I have to unlearn taking a string like “3.56” to an
integer power and getting a double precision value back. I have to
unlearn “$a{‘Sep’} = 3;” and replace it with “a[‘Sep’] = 3”, etc.
I don’t see that happening. I see Rails getting a lot of attention, and
many people being attracted first to it then, by way of Rails, to Ruby
in general. Ultimately, people seem to be getting enamored with the
language, with Rails as merely the “gateway drug”. The number of people
I’ve run across who do one project in Rails, then go on to use Ruby
without ever touching Rails again, outnumbers the people who come to
Rails and don’t continue to use Ruby for anything else.
Well, I downloaded Rails … I bought the book(s) … I worked through
half of the tutorial … and decided I wasn’t interested in building
that kind of web application. And until David Black’s book came along,
there really was no sense at all I could make from Rails. I could take
someone else’s Rails code and edit it without breaking it too badly,
re-implement something like the demo apps, etc., but I couldn’t actually
sit down, say, “I want my web application to do this, this, this and
this …”, and then sit down and make it happen. I simply didn’t have a
reading knowledge of Ruby.
Now I think I could do that; I’m just waiting for an excuse to build a
web app. Meanwhile, I’m building something else, and I’m building it in
pure Ruby. And I’m doing it in pure Ruby against the advice of folks who
think I should drop into C for the number crunching or use an existing
number crunching library written in C.
That’s true, too. I still don’t like it – and, in many cases, I think
Java was chosen for those applications because of the excellent
marketing Java has received, rather than because Java was the Right Tool
For The Job. Some of those applications might have been better written
using other languages. That doesn’t mean they’re bad apps, though.
Well … some of the Java applications I like are “Compendium”,
“DBDesigner4”, Protege, the PEPA Workbench, the GUI wrapper on PRISM,
and a couple of audio applications I haven’t used in a while. In those
cases, I think Java was chosen for its portability and for its
convenient GUI. It’s really being used as a “scripting language” in the
case of PRISM … the underlying application is in C for speed. The PEPA
Workbench was originally written in ML, but I don’t think the ML version
had a GUI. All the rest are “pure Java”.
They’re all GUI applications, and I suspect the only alternative to Java
would have been Tcl/Tk (or some other language with a Tk GUI) at the
time these applications were conceived. There are more choices now –
everybody has a Tk GUI, nearly everybody has a GTK, QT, Fox, and wx GUI
toolkit, and nearly everybody can do all this on Windows, Linux, Mac and
Solaris. Does Java still run on a Mac?
Yeah, even macro assembler. I’ll leave that work for someone else, for
the time being: it’s not my cup of tea.
The macro assembler programmers I know drink coffee … a lot of coffee.
Do Ruby programmers drink Ruby Mist?
I’d like to try to