Ruby's purpose?

Rails
1

Before I get flamed, I just want to start off by saying that I am new to
Ruby and I really enjoy this language and want to see it succeed.

But, what niche does this language fill?
These are serious question, not a put down of the language.

Does it has something to offer for Web 2.0?

Is it just another scripting language?

Does it suppose to replace something else?

Does it suppose to work with something else?

Why would someone use Ruby over something else?

What’s it’s purpose?

I’ve read that it is the successor to Java, how is that without native
GUI handling and without ODBC/JDBC database handling?

Thanks

2

I think you could answer yes to each one of your questions, but ruby’s
purpose for me is help me have a little fun when I code.

3

On 5/16/06, Regg Mr [email protected] wrote:

Before I get flamed, I just want to start off by saying that I am new
to Ruby and I really enjoy this language and want to see it succeed.

But, what niche does this language fill?

Does it have to fill a niche? Or can’t it be a general-purpose language
with libraries that help it fill many niches?

Does it has something to offer for Web 2.0?

In case you didn’t know, you’re posting on ruby-forum, but you’re
actually posting to the Rails mailing list. This makes it obvious that
Ruby has something to offer “Web 2.0” (and 3.0 and 4.0 and just plain
web apps, too, if you want to skip the hype).

Is it just another scripting language?

Yes, no. (It’s an interpreted language, but that does not mean that it’s
any less a real programming language because of that. People who make
that distinction [scripting language != real programming language] these
days either don’t know what they’re talking about or have a dog in the
fight.)

Does it suppose to replace something else?

No, yes. (Ruby isn’t to replace anything. It’s a separate language. It
will end up replacing other languages for projects, but it was written
to solve problems that Matz had with languages before it.)

Does it suppose to work with something else?

Yes, no. (Your question is unclear. Ruby is infinitely extensible and
will work with just about anything.)

Why would someone use Ruby over something else?

It’s fun? It’s more concise and expressive?

What’s it’s purpose?

Ruby doesn’t need a purpose. It is.

I’ve read that it is the successor to Java, how is that without native
GUI handling and without ODBC/JDBC database handling?

sigh

Wherever you read that, you either misread or the person who wrote it
didn’t know what they were talking about.

Ruby isn’t a successor to Java. Ruby is a different way of programming.

-austin

4

To “get” ruby :

Think of a cool app you can make. Read some Rails books (Agile Web
Development w/ Rails) and start coding.

You will have a series of what I call an “RoR moment”. This is when you
finish something like AJAX auto-complete or scaffolding for the first
time,
and you think to yourself “Wow, that was neat.”

You complete your application. You’ve learned some ruby and rails doing
this.

Time passes by, and you’re doing your day job, which might be in Java.
You
get a new assignment, a web app, in struts/tapestry/jsf/whatever

You start the app. Almost line by line, you will start to think to
yourself
“I can save so much time in RoR/this functionality is easy to implement
in
RoR”

Then you’ll cry.

Then you’ll beg your uppers to adopt RoR.

and then you will “get” ruby.

Jin (yeah, I cried)

5

Regg Mr wrote:

Before I get flamed, I just want to start off by saying that I am new to
Ruby and I really enjoy this language and want to see it succeed.

But, what niche does this language fill?
These are serious question, not a put down of the language.

Does it has something to offer for Web 2.0?

Is it just another scripting language?

Does it suppose to replace something else?

Does it suppose to work with something else?

Why would someone use Ruby over something else?

What’s it’s purpose?

I’ve read that it is the successor to Java, how is that without native
GUI handling and without ODBC/JDBC database handling?

Thanks

This is a good place to start

http://www.artima.com/intv/rubyP.html

6

On May 16, 2006, at 19:26, Regg Mr wrote:

Does it suppose to replace something else?

Ruby: Perl is a kludge, and Lisp syntax is scary.

“What Languages Fix”
http://www.paulgraham.com/fix.html

Cheers

–
PA, Onnay Equitursay
http://alt.textdrive.com/

7

I concur with Charlie. I’ve never had so much fun coding in my life as
when I work with Ruby (which is all day!)

-PJ

8

Hi,
Check out the June issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal – the cover article is
“Ruby On Rails Java’s Successor?” – interesting article…see next
month www.ddu.com

9

Good evening,

In the June edition of “Dr Dobb’s Journal”, the cover story is "Ruby On
Rails Java’s Successor? Check it out next month at www.ddj.com

I’ve been working with ASP.Net, C#, VB.Net and SQL Server for the past
two years. I’ve started working with RoR [Ruby On Rails] and MySql. I’m
going thru the book AWDWR [“Agile Web D. with Rails”] and I’m
finding it to fun…first time I could say that in long time.

Try it, I’m sure you’ll like it.

Cheers,
Pat

10

Regg Mr wrote:

Before I get flamed, I just want to start off by saying that I am new to
Ruby and I really enjoy this language and want to see it succeed.

But, what niche does this language fill?

Since you’re on a Rails list, certainly one niche it fills is the niche
occupied by agile methodology for developing Model-View-Controller web
applications.

These are serious question, not a put down of the language.

Does it has something to offer for Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is a buzzword more than anything else.

Is it just another scripting language?

It certainly started out as a scripting language, but when I look at the
language now (1.8.4) it seems more like a general-purpose
object-oriented programming language. The only thing in Ruby that I
think would put it in a “scripting” class is the fact that it contains
built-in regular expression processing, like Perl.

Does it suppose to replace something else?

Not that I know of. Billions of lines of code exist in other languages
– C, Perl, Python, Java, Lisp, Fortran, PHP, … There isn’t much
reason for those lines to get rewritten as long as their owners can find
programmers who know the languages.

New code, on the other hand, is a whole different story. Most of the
programming I do is in a specialized domain, computational mathematics
and statistics. For that purpose, I mostly use R and occasionally Axiom.
And I still maintain a fairly large base of Perl scripts that I have
written over the past ten years or so – well before I knew of Ruby’s
existence. My preference for new non-numeric code now would be Ruby.

Does it suppose to work with something else?

It works on its own or with most anything else. See “Enterprise
Integration with Ruby” for some of the “anything else”.

Why would someone use Ruby over something else?

Because they get paid to do it, because they enjoy doing it, or because
their parents forbade them to. :slight_smile:

What’s it’s purpose?

I’ve read that it is the successor to Java, how is that without native
GUI handling and without ODBC/JDBC database handling?

There is actually a “native” Ruby GUI, an interface to the Tk toolkit
similar to Perl/Tk. Most other toolkits, like Fox and QT, have Ruby
bindings. And there are numerous Ruby interfaces to databases, including
the free ones – MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL – and Oracle, MS SQL Server
and probably Sybase too.

Thanks

–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

11

What would you like it to do for you?

12

All of what you have listed is what got me looking at Rubt in the first
place.

Other than the language being fun, I have to make a living, what can it
do for me that i don’t already have?

Pat L. wrote:

Good evening,

In the June edition of “Dr Dobb’s Journal”, the cover story is "Ruby On
Rails Java’s Successor? Check it out next month at www.ddj.com

I’ve been working with ASP.Net, C#, VB.Net and SQL Server for the past
two years. I’ve started working with RoR [Ruby On Rails] and MySql. I’m
going thru the book AWDWR [“Agile Web D. with Rails”] and I’m
finding it to fun…first time I could say that in long time.

Try it, I’m sure you’ll like it.

Cheers,
Pat

13

On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 20:32 -0700, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

Does it suppose to work with something else?

It works on its own or with most anything else. See “Enterprise
Integration with Ruby” for some of the “anything else”.

We have been reviewing this book at work. The book’s definition of
enterprise computing is a couple of scales smaller than my real world
day-to-day work.

Ruby is there for “bread and butter” applications, but it isn’t quite up
to interacting with a mission critical, busy (1.2M transactions per hour
average, 2.4M peak) database that is shared amongst multiple
applications.

However, that level of support is coming as the language matures.

What I find most lacking is support for prepared statements in the SQL
drivers. In most circumstances, the prepare actually consumes more time
than the execution of a query. I have seen real queries take 20 minutes
to prepare, but 30 milliseconds to execute. In a busy production
environment, you can often afford a one-time startup cost of prepare,
but you can’t afford to spend 80% of your DBMS CPU on repeated prepares
of the same query.

In a really busy enterprise scale database, prepared statements are the
difference between doesn’t work at all and flies through work without
any stress.

JDBC gets around the lack of prepared statement support in some DBMS’s
by faking the prepared statements with sanitized string substitution
(like ActiveRecord uses), but supporting it fully where a native DBMS
solution exists. So far, I have confirmed that prepared statement
support exists for firebird (and interbase), DB2, Oracle, MS-SQL,
Sybase, and Access.

With Jim Starkey (architect of Firebird/Interbase/RDB and
Netfrastructure) moving to MySQL, we can expect MySQL to support
prepared statements in the near future (about the same time it supports
real ACID transactions).

14

On 5/16/06, PA [email protected] wrote:

“What Languages Fix”
What Languages Fix

JavaScript doesn’t fix anything. Interesting.

15

Woof… don’t tell Douglas Crockford that!

b

(JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language)