...that's a presentation I'm giving there tonight (in about 2 hours) if
anyone's interested 
Sorry for the late notice!
Directions and whatnot are here:
http://www.novajug.com:8080/meetings/core.html
Yours,
Tom
Presentation went well. Generated a lot of discussion. There were generally three camps at this meeting:
1. Pro-Ruby. These people are awesome, and need no further description.
2. Architects with a capital A. These people know way too many ways to say "ontology." They were unhappy for two reasons (as far as I could tell):
- Ruby code defies attempts to structure it simply, so it is inaccessible to standards such as UML. It's not just classes and methods any more. (Well, it is, but at runtime, and UML is devoid of sequence information. And try making that argument to these guys.)
- "Programmers are, by and large, morons of the highest order, and must not be allowed to override String#length. Or, for that matter, do anything cool."
3. Java purists.
- "You can write spaghetti code in Ruby."
- "It's not scalable for large projects."
- "The libs aren't complete/documented/flexible enough for my needs."
Take these stereotypes with the appropriate measure of salt, of course. There were some inbetweeners, of course. One guy (my guess is programmer turned manager) was absolutely in love with Ruby, as a "scripting language," but for general purpose use? "I'd be an idiot to to recommend Ruby for the sort of large project that Java is used for."
Just a small snapshot of what some outsiders think, if you're curious.
Devin
Tom Copeland wrote:
···
...that's a presentation I'm giving there tonight (in about 2 hours) if
anyone's interestedSorry for the late notice!
Directions and whatnot are here:
http://www.novajug.com:8080/meetings/core.html
Yours,
Tom