[OT]Is Ruby Top 1 of Programming Languages that are Loved?

ruby-talk
21

Sean Russell wrote:

ptkwt@aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) wrote in message
news:c7c3sk01odk@enews2.newsguy.com…

must so many of us wear the Cruel Shoes of Java? Ruby needs a killer
app, like an interpreter in Mozilla so that web designers can script
with Ruby instead of Javascript.

That would be very nice. Maybe it’s a matter of ‘converting’ the right
people in the Mozilla project.

Maybe. I mean, it wouldn’t be widespread unless other browsers
started supporting it (IE, in particular), but it would be nice. I
think if somebody submitted a patch to Mozilla that enabled this
support, it might be kindly received. Perhaps not.

Ruby support in Mozilla would not be limited to just browser use. Mozilla is
actually a complete development platform whose core features include XML
based GUI specification, HTML rendering and deep support for internet
connectivity.

All Mozilla applications (browser, email, news reader) are basically written
in JavaScript that run on top of the “mozilla platform”. If this could be
done in Ruby instead of JavaScript then you could build Ruby applications
that build on the full power of the mozilla platform (and, incidentally, you
could use Ruby to script your HTML pages – but, as you pointed out, this
would be of limited usefulness with the support of other browsers).

Its not necessary to inspire or ‘convert’ anyone on the mozilla project. The
design of Mozilla provides for multiple scripting languages, its just that
JavaScript is the only one implemented so far. All it would take is for some
Ruby champion with enough interest and time to develop a Mozilla plugin
(XPCOM object, in Mozilla parlance) that adds Ruby support to Mozilla.

I’ve brought this up several times hoping some Ruby developer would get
excited enough to give it a try (I wish I had the time). But so far it
hasn’t happened.

Curt

22

In article 20040506112301.GA20201@lb.tenfour,

···

Dick Davies rasputnik@hellooperator.net wrote:

Last week I went for a job interview for a Perl/C/C++ job. One of the
interviewers saw that I had done a lot of Perl (including OOPerl) in the
past, so he started asking me a lot of Perl questions.

Funnily enough, I had an interview where I got asked some simple Perl
questions, which were easy enough to answer.

Then I got a real beauty: ‘So, what would you say is wrong with Perl?’

20 minutes of rant later, the interviewer was asking about where he
could get Ruby.

I start next week.

Are they looking for more people who know Ruby? Anyplace that is that
open to change sounds like a good place to work. Sign me up!

Phil

23

Sean Russell wrote:

ptkwt@aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) wrote in message news:c7c3sk01odk@enews2.newsguy.com…

Yeah, mine’s quickly coming to an end… I must say I’ve been lucky, I

Bummer. Too bad we all can’t band together and start a Ruby Solutions
company :slight_smile:

I think this has been brought up before by others, but I’d be willing to
work for less $ (don’t spread this around too much :slight_smile: to work on a Ruby
project than I would be willing to work for doing the

Heck, yeah. What clients don’t understand yet is that they’d be
getting more for their money.

Luckily, my clients could give a darn what I use. They do see
productivity. They like that.

Hm. Of all the things I said Ruby “needs”, what would be the most
useful is improved code validation tools, like a type checker. People
tend to not trust scripting languages for large projects; personally,
I blame Javascript and VB for giving all other scripting languages a
bad name.

Ouch. I did a lot of server side stuff w/javscript. We had about 10
developers sharing a largish code library, including a templating
system, that simply made our job simpler and better. We never had any
problems(bugs we could not kill) and were quite productive - especially
related to other teams that insisted on using vb components(compiled).

who would make that trade too. So maybe instead of offshoring, corporations
should figure out what languages people would code in for less$ if given
the opportunity (also, consider the productivity gain they would get by
using Ruby) :wink:

Unfortunately, it is often a case of someone who thinks they know
enough about architecture issues making the decision that the project
needs to be done in one language or another. In a lot of cases, the
decisision is actually based on good requirements. As much as I love
Ruby, I wouldn’t think of it first if I was trying to architect a
GUI-heavy client. Additionally, Ruby isn’t “well known”, and
obscurity can do a lot of damage to a language when it is being
considered for a project. Where’s the support if something goes
wrong? Finally, there are the performance issues. Often, it is
reasonable to choose a single language with decent performance rather
than choose to use two languages, one for glue, and one for
performance-critical code.

So, are we ruined by Ruby? :wink:

I know I’m spoiled.

must so many of us wear the Cruel Shoes of Java? Ruby needs a killer
app, like an interpreter in Mozilla so that web designers can script
with Ruby instead of Javascript.

Cruel Shoes of Java,lol,that is good.

That would be very nice. Maybe it’s a matter of ‘converting’ the right
people in the Mozilla project.

Maybe. I mean, it wouldn’t be widespread unless other browsers
started supporting it (IE, in particular), but it would be nice. I
think if somebody submitted a patch to Mozilla that enabled this
support, it might be kindly received. Perhaps not.

Plenty of folks out there mandate a browser - usually IE. For solutions
that i could ensure the browser to by moz, using a ruby interp would be
grrreat!
:paul

24

Hi,

Sean Russell wrote:

ptkwt@aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) wrote in message news:c7c3sk01odk@enews2.newsguy.com…

Yeah, mine’s quickly coming to an end… I must say I’ve been lucky, I

Bummer. Too bad we all can’t band together and start a Ruby Solutions
company :slight_smile:

Why can’t we? Too busy looking for a Ruby job? Or too busy working on a,
say, VB job?
Or… too busy working on a Ruby job? (That’s the reason I’d accept)

So, are we ruined by Ruby? :wink:

I know I’m spoiled.

To me it’s a blessing and a burden.
A blessing if I can use it, and a burden if I don’t (and thus have to
think about how great times could be if I were usinf it).

Happy rubying

Stephan

25

“Dick Davies” rasputnik@hellooperator.net schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:20040507112333.GB19224@lb.tenfour…

See, if they’d been marketed as well as Pe[a]rl Jam, the history of
scripting
languages might have been very different…

Sounds like a nice subject for a thesis: investigation about the
correspondece between programming language success and similarly named
popular musical artists.

:slight_smile:

robert
26

Simon Strandgaard wrote:

BTW: I love Ruby more than any other thing I have loved earlier.
I expect to extend my relationship with Ruby in the future, getting married,
having children… etc.

So far so good…

Ruby is like Britney Spears.

…

I’m a loss for words. (It took 5 minutes to recover from the shock and
write this reply.)

The only faintly positive resemblance I can muster is that you are
placing Ruby as a potential, symbolic “mistress” for your future wife to
get annoyed with, as your attention span wanders elsewhere, and an
obsession that will eventually cause divorce.

All other explanations would require extreme and painful behavioural
modification training of you. :wink:

···

–
([ Kent Dahl ]/)_ ~ [ Kent Dahl - Kent Dahl ]/~
))_student_/(( _d L b_/ Master of Science in Technology )
( __õ|õ// ) ) Industrial economics and technology management (
_/ö____/ (_engineering.discipline=Computer::Technology)

27

How about writing all these querying ideas into a ruby script that calls
Google’s API to prove its own dominance?

28

Ara.T.Howard wrote:

this makes me think - there is a lot of presentaion material out there
praising ruby (matz’s slides, pragmatic programmer stuff, personal
presentations). what about pooling resources and putting
together something
really slick and professional and putting it up on ruby-lang
for people to
use? postgresql is attempting to do this… seems like a good
idea. if only
we could distill _why’s book… :wink:

thoughts??

I think this is an excellent idea!

I think we should set up a pseudo project on RubyForge for collaboration on
this. The project wiki can be used for general brainstorming/collaboration.
CVS and released files can be used to house the resulting professional-level
promotional materials. These could include presentation slides, white
papers, comparisons, testimonials, productivity metrics, etc.

The goal would be to be an ongoing resource for people who need to promote
Ruby.

Curt

PS
Ok… I just convinced myself! I’m going to get this set up on RubyForge.
I’ll post an announcement when its ready for contributions and
collaboration. I should be able to do it this evening.

29

Well said indeed. Whenever I run across a Perl/Bash/whatever script
that I wrote to tweak Bugzilla data or whatever, I rewrite it as a Ruby
script. I know it’ll be easier to maintain, and it spreads the meme :slight_smile:

Tom

···

On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 10:33, Ara.T.Howard wrote:

my point is this: you may
have a ‘ruby job’ already!

30

Ara.T.Howard wrote:

this makes me think - there is a lot of presentaion material out there
praising ruby (matz’s slides, pragmatic programmer stuff, personal
presentations). what about pooling resources and putting together something
really slick and professional and putting it up on ruby-lang for people to
use? postgresql is attempting to do this… seems like a good idea. if only
we could distill _why’s book… :wink:

That’s a great thing to do. But actually what I long for is a killer app
for us to brag, a poster child for Ruby greatness, a popular app that
forces one to install Ruby. I wonder why nothing has really surfaced so
far [with as great success as with the other languages]. Python has
Mailman, Zope (and Plone), Ensim (but I think recent versions of Ensim
is written in Java), Chandler. PHP also has lots (PHPNuke, phpBB, the
various popular webmail, etc). Perl has Webmin, SQL-Ledger, majordomo…
But where are the Ruby programs? I know Ruby are younger than many other
popular languages, but things like Zope and Mailman has been started
years ago…

···

–
dave

31

In article 409A7AC8.2040403@vudmaska.com,

Sean Russell wrote:

ptkwt@aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) wrote in message
news:c7c3sk01odk@enews2.newsguy.com…

That would be very nice. Maybe it’s a matter of ‘converting’ the right
people in the Mozilla project.

Maybe. I mean, it wouldn’t be widespread unless other browsers
started supporting it (IE, in particular), but it would be nice. I
think if somebody submitted a patch to Mozilla that enabled this
support, it might be kindly received. Perhaps not.

Plenty of folks out there mandate a browser - usually IE. For solutions
that i could ensure the browser to by moz, using a ruby interp would be
grrreat!

The other thing to consider is that Mozilla has become a platform of it’s
own (see: “Rapid Application Development with Mozilla” by McFarlane).

On the current contract which requires a cross-platform GUI that does an
awful lot of things that a browser does, we considered including Mozilla
on our CD for doing this, however it was too large for our space budget
(we have about 10MB available). However, if our space budget had been
more like 20 to 25MB, Mozilla would have been the way to go. Being able to
script Mozilla in Ruby would have been very nice.

Phil

···

Paul Vudmaska paul@vudmaska.com wrote:

32

James Britt jamesUNDERBARb@neurogami.com wrote in message news:409A3F01.6070302@neurogami.com…

About a month ago I interviewed a number of candidates for a Java
developer position.

James… dude… why do you never call me when these things come up?
A month ago I was sitting here, on the couch watching endless “Buffy”
DVDs from NetFlix, eating bon-bons and busily being unemployed.

Don’t you love me anymore?!?

Aside from the usual tech questions, I asked them what they didn’t like
about the language. Most of them had a hard time thinking of anything.

Oh, heck… I was a shoe-in for that job. I could have given you an
earful. :wink:

And this is not a jab at Java; I would think that anybody deeply
familiar with a language would have a few things things they disliked
about it, even if, on the whole, they loved the language.

Good point. So, I hereby proclaim this the first annual J.B. Ruby
Roast. Come on, cough up. What don’t you like about Ruby?

I’ll start it off with my favorite: the missing type checker. I’d
like “-c” to also check types, as much as it can. It should be
doable, too; Ruby will never be strongly typed, but it should be
possible to Duck-check the Duck-types in a large number of cases.

— SER

33

ptkwt@aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) wrote in message news:c7dph00a07@enews2.newsguy.com…

20 minutes of rant later, the interviewer was asking about where he
could get Ruby.

I start next week.

Are they looking for more people who know Ruby? Anyplace that is that
open to change sounds like a good place to work. Sign me up!

Ditto.

— SER

34

Paul Vudmaska paul@vudmaska.com wrote in message news:409A7AC8.2040403@vudmaska.com…

Luckily, my clients could give a darn what I use. They do see
productivity. They like that.

That’s always nice, when you encounter people like that. I’ve been
stuck as a contractor for the past 8 years, and people who hire
contractors tend to be more touchy about what the project is written
in – they want to be able to maintain it after you’re gone.

I had one client, once, who didn’t really care. He had an app that
was 10 years old that he was still maintaining and growing.
Unfortunately, he really didn’t care what it was written in, and by
the time I got to it, it was a total hodgepodge of C, Bash, Perl, TCL
– even Pascal. Believe me, it is times like that when I totally
approve of language fascists. Nonetheless, I couldn’t resist
throwing Ruby into the mix, and I got rid of a small chunk of Bash
script while I was at it.

Ouch. I did a lot of server side stuff w/javscript. We had about 10

Oh, don’t get me started on Javascript. I’m sure it is better than
VB, but I’ve got a lot of bones to pick with JS. The OO stuff is just
nasty. It looks like a language that was designed by a committee…
oh, wait! It was!

Anyway, nothing personal. If you can get along with JS, then good for
you. There is a lot of use for JS, especially if you’re doing any web
front-end stuff. It certainly is ubiquitous; I’ve had to do a fair
amount of it myself.

Plenty of folks out there mandate a browser - usually IE. For solutions
that i could ensure the browser to by moz, using a ruby interp would be
grrreat!

As anybody who reads this group knows, I have an ulterior motive for
wanting Ruby in Mozilla… because Ruby would then suddenly have
access to both a really nice, fairly ubiquitous GUI toolkit, and a
peerless application distribution mechanism.

— SER

35

In article 20040506112301.GA20201@lb.tenfour,

Funnily enough, I had an interview where I got asked some simple Perl
questions, which were easy enough to answer.

Then I got a real beauty: ‘So, what would you say is wrong with Perl?’

20 minutes of rant later, the interviewer was asking about where he
could get Ruby.

I start next week.

Are they looking for more people who know Ruby? Anyplace that is that
open to change sounds like a good place to work. Sign me up!

That’s the weird thing, it’s not a ruby development job!
It’s sysadmin looking after a java appserver, but they have to build their
own tools to workaround shortcomings in java - which they seem to be doing
in perl (for now ).

But yeah, they sound like a good crowd (it’s a University, I guess that
helps).

Personally I’ve found that development jobs tend to require a particular
language, whereas sysadmin lets you use whatever will get the job done,
so long as it does gets the job done within the deadline.

Samba for example snuck to popularity because a few guys replaced their
shitty NT boxen with it and didn’t bother telling the boss until he
asked why the servers weren’t going down so often.

My current employer has a particularly horrible php ordering system,
truly the worst code I ever saw. When we finally met the developers I tried
to diplomatically ask some questions about performance, their respone was
‘this would be so much easier in perl…’

Turns out one requirement for the system was that it had to be written in
PHP! Possibly ‘Intrusive Management Quarterly’ had run a piece on it to
give J2EE a break?

Now that’s not to slag off PHP, but making experienced Perl coders resort
to Dummies guides, against a deadline, to cobble something together
is probably not a smart move.
You end up with the code equivalent of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins…

If it’d been me, I’d have written a perl version,
registered the .php mimetype with a perl-handler and got on with my life.

···

–
For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.
– Abraham Lincoln
Rasputin :: Jack of All Trades - Master of Nuns

36

Stephan Kämper Stephan.Kaemper@Schleswig-Holstein.de wrote in message news:2g0u0mF38417U1@uni-berlin.de…

Bummer. Too bad we all can’t band together and start a Ruby Solutions
company :slight_smile:

Why can’t we? Too busy looking for a Ruby job? Or too busy working on a,
say, VB job?
Or… too busy working on a Ruby job? (That’s the reason I’d accept)

The two reasons that generally stop me from these sorts of endeavors
is that, first, to have a successful company, you have to be supplying
something for which there is demand. The second point is that running
a company usually involves a lot of paperwork and marketting, and I’ve
yet to find a developer who’s willing to dedicate her/his share of the
effort to doing this stuff.

— SER

37

Robert Klemme wrote:

Sounds like a nice subject for a thesis: investigation about the
correspondece between programming language success and similarly named
popular musical artists.

Lessee, Dylan? Uh, oh, a counterexample.

38

[snip]

BTW: I love Ruby more than any other thing I have loved earlier.
I expect to extend my relationship with Ruby in the future, getting married,
having children… etc. Ruby is like Britney Spears.

FYI today at 2250 after work in airport, I was putting lights on my bike, and
suddenly britney + crew + papparatizs showed up.
I have now been within 5 meters of Britney Spears!!! I still chocked.

When you talk about the sun… the sun arrives!

···

–
Simon Strandgaard

39

that is a nice idea, But I wonder: what could be distilled in this
‘selling rubys’ project that could not be done via ruby-lang.org or
rubygarden ?

Note that I found the idea of a centralized advocacy think tank as
something good, but I’m not that good at thinking why this seem nice
to me :slight_smile:

···

il Fri, 7 May 2004 00:05:03 +0900, “Curt Hibbs” curt@hibbs.com ha scritto::

I think this is an excellent idea!

I think we should set up a pseudo project on RubyForge for collaboration on
this. The project wiki can be used for general brainstorming/collaboration.
CVS and released files can be used to house the resulting professional-level
promotional materials. These could include presentation slides, white
papers, comparisons, testimonials, productivity metrics, etc.

The goal would be to be an ongoing resource for people who need to promote
Ruby.

Curt

PS
Ok… I just convinced myself! I’m going to get this set up on RubyForge.
I’ll post an announcement when its ready for contributions and
collaboration. I should be able to do it this evening.

40

Another Python poster child example - BitTorrent.

And I agree wholeheartedly. It’ll be a happy day when someone announces
the Ruby “take it to the next level” app…

Yours,

Tom

···

On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 14:37, David Garamond wrote:

Ara.T.Howard wrote:

this makes me think - there is a lot of presentaion material out there
praising ruby (matz’s slides, pragmatic programmer stuff, personal
presentations). what about pooling resources and putting together something
really slick and professional and putting it up on ruby-lang for people to
use? postgresql is attempting to do this… seems like a good idea. if only
we could distill _why’s book… :wink:

But actually what I long for is a killer app
for us to brag, a poster child for Ruby greatness, a popular app that
forces one to install Ruby.