I think to be fair you need to try out BeanShell. I’ve played with it
for a few minutes at a time, and I think it’s pretty safe to say it
lacks some of Ruby’s important features, but I really think to convince
your coworkers, you personally need to have some experience in what
you’re trying to steer them away from, otherwise you’re committing a
similar error to the one they are in lumping Ruby in with all other
scripting languages.
Al
···
-----Original Message-----
From: Harry Ohlsen [mailto:harryo@zip.com.au]
Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2003 4:00 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: New Ruby book
On Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:31, Jack Herrington wrote:
I reckon I could get them into Ruby by showing them tools
that can
augment their Java development. Once they start playing with Ruby
for
that
kind of thing, I think they’ll see the power and make it a serious
choice for
general work.
I’d love to hear if that works.
I’ll report back … success or failure.
It’s not so much that they’re anti anything non-Java, just that they
don’t
seem to want to try Ruby.
Every time I talk to someone about it, they seem to lump Ruby in with
every
other scripting language and believe it’s of no value for “real” work.
They’d rather use BeanShell, which is a scripting language that looks
like
Java. I have to admit, I’ve not tried it (because I’ve already found
the
best scripting language :-), but I can’t imagine it being as neat as
Ruby.
The book came out as an ebook on Monday, and is at the printers right
now. Hardcopy should start shipping in a couple of weeks if you buy
from Manning.
Terrific. Being here in Australia, maybe I’ll talk my boss into buying
me a
copy of the eBook and then wait for the print version to get here
(sometimes
takes a while), especially since Manning offers a refund on the eBook
when
you buy the paper version.
Cheers,
Harry O.
In my python days (prior to ruby) I had had a brief play with bean shell
as it comes with netbeans and I wasnt really impressed
···
On Sat, 2003-07-19 at 06:24, Albert Chou wrote:
I think to be fair you need to try out BeanShell. I’ve played with it
for a few minutes at a time, and I think it’s pretty safe to say it
lacks some of Ruby’s important features, but I really think to
convince your coworkers, you personally need to have some experience
in what you’re trying to steer them away from, otherwise you’re
committing a similar error to the one they are in lumping Ruby in with
all other scripting languages.
Al
-----Original Message-----
From: Harry Ohlsen [mailto:harryo@zip.com.au]
Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2003 4:00 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: New Ruby book
On Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:31, Jack Herrington wrote:
I reckon I could get them into Ruby by showing them tools
that can
augment their Java development. Once they start playing with Ruby
for
that
kind of thing, I think they’ll see the power and make it a serious
choice for
general work.
I’d love to hear if that works.
I’ll report back … success or failure.
It’s not so much that they’re anti anything non-Java, just that they
don’t
seem to want to try Ruby.
Every time I talk to someone about it, they seem to lump Ruby in with
every
other scripting language and believe it’s of no value for “real” work.
They’d rather use BeanShell, which is a scripting language that looks
like
Java. I have to admit, I’ve not tried it (because I’ve already found
the
best scripting language :-), but I can’t imagine it being as neat as
Ruby.
The book came out as an ebook on Monday, and is at the printers
right
now. Hardcopy should start shipping in a couple of weeks if you buy
from Manning.
Terrific. Being here in Australia, maybe I’ll talk my boss into
buying me a
copy of the eBook and then wait for the print version to get here
(sometimes
takes a while), especially since Manning offers a refund on the eBook
when
you buy the paper version.
Cheers,
Harry O.
Albert Chou wrote:
I think to be fair you need to try out BeanShell. I’ve played with it
for a few minutes at a time, and I think it’s pretty safe to say it
lacks some of Ruby’s important features, but I really think to convince
your coworkers, you personally need to have some experience in what
you’re trying to steer them away from, otherwise you’re committing a
similar error to the one they are in lumping Ruby in with all other
scripting languages.
That’s a fair comment! All I’d really done was do some reading about
BeanShell, but it sounded too little like a real scripting language for
my taste.
Fortunately, I didn’t read this until others had replied, pointing out some
of the inadequacies of BeanShell; certainly enough for me to not want to be
stuck using it.
Now, I can just make those points, rather than having to suffer the pain
of finding out for myself :-).
Cheers,
Harry O.
[My coworkers would] rather use BeanShell, which is a scripting language
that looks like Java.
“maillist@bestworldweb.homelinux.com” wrote:
In my python days (prior to ruby) I had had a brief play with bean shell
as it comes with netbeans and I wasnt really impressed
I second that. We used it at my former job for test scripts, and we all
quickly got frustrated with it:
-
It parses files line by line. If the operation on line 3 took a long
time, and the operation on line 4 had a syntax or semantic error, you’d
wait for line 3 to complete before the script would fail. (I can’t
remember if it even stopped to execute finally clauses, leaving the test
environment in an inconsistent state.)
-
Its similarity to Java, an initial selling point, means iterating
over a collection required a loop construct, regular expression matching
requires a library, and populating a new Map or List requires a
statement for each element.
-
It lacks classes and synchronization primitives present in Java. You
can substitute BeanShell’s hokey function closures and Doug Lea’s
concurrency classes, but that’s just more annoyance.
BeanShell has all the disadvantages of primitive scripting languages
and all the disadvantages of Java. It’s great if you want to
interpret short Java statements, but awful to do any significant coding
in.
If you want to wean them away from BeanShell, tackle these problems
head-on:
-
Introduce a syntax error in a BeanShell script and a Ruby script, and
demonstrate when the error gets caught in each case (e.g. with
println/puts).
-
Demonstrate a practical task that involves statically creating a
hashtable and then iterating over it, or – hey! – a code-generator in
Ruby and in BeanShell.
-
Look at some of the existing scripts, and point out cicumlocutions or
verbosity due to a lack of sychronization or true classes. Also point
out the advantages of Ruby blocks, which are way simpler and more
powerful than BeanShell function objects.
The only advantage of BeanShell over Ruby (or Python, Perl, Tcl, Scheme,
Basic …) is its simple interaction with Java. While I don’t know what
your coworkers use BeanShell for, but if they use it to script
production code or legacy tools, maybe you could rig up a simple
bridge. There’s also a project just starting up to interface Ruby and a
JVM, although I can’t find the original posting at the moment.
···
On Sat, 2003-07-19 at 06:24, Albert Chou wrote:
–
Frank Mitchell (frankm each bayarea period net)
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See We Can Put an End to Word Attachments - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
The only advantage of BeanShell over Ruby (or Python, Perl, Tcl, Scheme,
jpython integrates really well into java.
JVM, although I can’t find the original posting at the moment.
Cheers
Paul
I suppose he’s talking about RJNI,
http://www.ruby-talk.org/blade/75068
···
il Sat, 19 Jul 2003 14:11:39 +0900, “maillist@bestworldweb.homelinux.com” maillist@bestworldweb.homelinux.com ha scritto::
The only advantage of BeanShell over Ruby (or Python, Perl, Tcl, Scheme,
jpython integrates really well into java.
JVM, although I can’t find the original posting at the moment.
http://jruby.sourceforge.net/
gabriele renzi wrote:
The only advantage of BeanShell over Ruby (or Python, Perl, Tcl,
Scheme,
jpython integrates really well into java.
JVM, although I can’t find the original posting at the moment.
http://jruby.sourceforge.net/
I suppose he’s talking about RJNI,
http://www.ruby-talk.org/blade/75068
That’s the one, although I forgot about JRuby and Jython. (JRuby didn’t
compile for me under JDK 1.4 last time I looked at it, but that was
several months ago.)
···
il Sat, 19 Jul 2003 14:11:39 +0900, > “maillist@bestworldweb.homelinux.com” > maillist@bestworldweb.homelinux.com ha scritto::
–
Frank Mitchell (frankm each bayarea period net)
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See We Can Put an End to Word Attachments - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
I’m still working on it.
I am quickly coming to the stage where some external help will be
required. Frankly, I just don’t know if anybody actually downloaded
the technology preview, so I am planning a ‘fan service’ release to get
people to check it out.
In case somebody wants to take a look at the code as it was 2 weeks ago,
it’s at http://thekode.net/ruby/rjni/
Some additional info here: http://www.thekode.net/cgi-bin/blog
and in
···
On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 11:29:51PM +0900, gabriele renzi wrote:
The only advantage of BeanShell over Ruby (or Python, Perl, Tcl, Scheme,
jpython integrates really well into java.
JVM, although I can’t find the original posting at the moment.
http://jruby.sourceforge.net/
I suppose he’s talking about RJNI,
http://www.ruby-talk.org/blade/75068
–
_ _
__ __ | | ___ _ __ ___ __ _ _ __
'_ \ / | __/ __| '_ _ \ / ` | ’ \
) | (| | |__ \ | | | | | (| | | | |
.__/ _,|_|/| || ||_,|| |_|
Running Debian GNU/Linux Sid (unstable)
batsman dot geo at yahoo dot com
Look, I’m about to buy me a double barreled sawed off shotgun and show
Linus what I think about backspace and delete not working.
– some anonymous .signature
JRuby definitely compiles under 1.4 now. I did it just last night.
Joey
···
On Sun, 20 Jul 2003 00:30:13 +0900, Frank Mitchell frankm@bayarea.net wrote:
That’s the one, although I forgot about JRuby and Jython. (JRuby didn’t
compile for me under JDK 1.4 last time I looked at it, but that was
several months ago.)
–
Dean saor, dean saor an spiorad. Is seinn d’orain beo.
http://www.joeygibson.com/blog