### Author:  [@CodeToad](https://rubytalk.org/u/CodeToad)
#### Post date: [25 October 2007 20:50 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/whats-in-your-ruby-could-ruby-ever-be-a-g-p-dev-language/41675/1 "2007-10-25T20:50:12Z")
Hi Folks,
I just finished my first 40+ hours with plain old Ruby (without rails
for now), and I love this stuff!! Everyone relates it to smalltalk,
and that seems mostly true.
Being a Certified Old Dude (and sometimes a quant-heavy economist), it
does remind me of the pleasurable experience of learning serious
programming tripping along with smalltalk on one end and various lisp
incarnations on the other, circa xerox/parc days. So...
What are you doing with ruby?
What would you \*like\* to do with ruby?
Do you see ruby as a focal-point or general purpose language?
Has anyone worked with ruby along side c++ ?
Has anyone tryed ruby with Qt4 ?
How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity?
Thanks,
OldCodeToad
TheOldCodeToad att gmaillll.commercial
---
### Author:  [@Forum](https://rubytalk.org/u/Forum)
#### Post date: [25 October 2007 21:53 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/whats-in-your-ruby-could-ruby-ever-be-a-g-p-dev-language/41675/2 "2007-10-25T21:53:47Z")
> Hi Folks,
> I just finished my first 40+ hours with plain old Ruby (without rails
> for now), and I love this stuff!! Everyone relates it to smalltalk,
> and that seems mostly true.
>
> Being a Certified Old Dude (and sometimes a quant-heavy economist), it
> does remind me of the pleasurable experience of learning serious
> programming tripping along with smalltalk on one end and various lisp
> incarnations on the other, circa xerox/parc days. So...
>
> What are you doing with ruby?
lots of metaprogramming, text processing, ssh and telnet clients, Webservers
DSL, XML parsing and even OLE for Word document creation and Excel parsing.
And yes of course mission critical SW for a spacecraft 😉
> or general purpose language?
GP
> Has anyone worked with ruby along side c++ ?
nope 🙂
> Has anyone tryed ruby with Qt4 ?
nope :))
> How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity?
no idea
> Thanks,
> OldCodeToad
> TheOldCodeToad att gmaillll.commercial
R.
> **···**
>
> On 10/25/07, CodeToad \ wrote:
> --
> what do I think about Ruby?
> [http://ruby-smalltalk.blogspot.com/](http://ruby-smalltalk.blogspot.com/)
---
### Author:  [@M\_Edward\_Ed\_Borasky1](https://rubytalk.org/u/M_Edward_Ed_Borasky1)
#### Post date: [26 October 2007 05:17 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/whats-in-your-ruby-could-ruby-ever-be-a-g-p-dev-language/41675/3 "2007-10-26T05:17:33Z")
CodeToad wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> I just finished my first 40+ hours with plain old Ruby (without rails
> for now), and I love this stuff!! Everyone relates it to smalltalk,
> and that seems mostly true.
>
> Being a Certified Old Dude (and sometimes a quant-heavy economist), it
> does remind me of the pleasurable experience of learning serious
> programming tripping along with smalltalk on one end and various lisp
> incarnations on the other, circa xerox/parc days. So...
>
> What are you doing with ruby?
Pretty much anything I can. At the moment I'm seeing how tightly I can tweak the interpreter using "standard" Gnu/Linux tricks.
> What would you \*like\* to do with ruby?
The "big bad project" is something called RAMEAU ([http://cougar.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/Rameau/Rameau.pdf\](http://cougar.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/Rameau/Rameau.pdf%5C)), which is really more like a Linux distro than a Ruby project, although all of the infrastructure above the (Gentoo) Linux level is in Ruby. But I have some smaller things I want to do as well.
What I tend to do is pick the "native language" for any given project. So when I work in algorithmic composition, I tend to do it in Lisp, even though the sort of things I do would work in almost any language. That's because I can hack on existing Lisp code like AthenaCL and Common Music. When I do something numeric/statistical, I do it in R, and when I do scripting/DSL/etc., I do it in Ruby.
> Do you see ruby as a focal-point or general purpose language?
It's general purpose in the sense that it's a good combination of the best parts of Perl and Java. But it's not general purpose in the same sense as C or C++ -- yet. 🙂
> Has anyone worked with ruby along side c++ ?
There are plenty of interfaces to C++ code in Ruby -- most of the major C++ open source libraries have Ruby bindings, for example.
> Has anyone tryed ruby with Qt4 ?
There is an excellent Ruby library/binding for both Qt3 and Qt4.
> How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity?
Never heard of it.
> **···**
>
> > Thanks,
> > OldCodeToad
> > TheOldCodeToad att gmaillll.commercial
---
### Author:  [@David\_A\_Black1](https://rubytalk.org/u/David_A_Black1)
#### Post date: [26 October 2007 12:29 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/whats-in-your-ruby-could-ruby-ever-be-a-g-p-dev-language/41675/4 "2007-10-26T12:29:51Z")
Hi --
> Hi Folks,
> I just finished my first 40+ hours with plain old Ruby (without rails
> for now), and I love this stuff!! Everyone relates it to smalltalk,
> and that seems mostly true.
Welcome!
> Being a Certified Old Dude (and sometimes a quant-heavy economist), it
> does remind me of the pleasurable experience of learning serious
> programming tripping along with smalltalk on one end and various lisp
> incarnations on the other, circa xerox/parc days. So...
>
> What are you doing with ruby?
Programming, authoring, training, consulting.... I would say that in
my own day-to-day, non-public stuff, text processing looms very large
in my Ruby use.
> What would you \*like\* to do with ruby?
I'm still mining it for what it's already able to let me do.
> Do you see ruby as a focal-point or general purpose language?
I'm not sure what you mean by focal point. I've certainly focused on
it 🙂 It's definitely best described as a general-purpose programming
language -- not all-purpose (the quant-heavy economist in you might
not use it for everything), but certainly not specialized on any one
problem domain.
David
> **···**
>
> On Fri, 26 Oct 2007, CodeToad wrote:
>
> --
> Upcoming training by David A. Black/Ruby Power and Light, LLC:
> \* Advancing With Rails, Edison, NJ, November 6-9
> \* Advancing With Rails, Berlin, Germany, November 19-22
> \* Intro to Rails, London, UK, December 3-6 (by Skills Matter)
> See [http://www.rubypal.com](http://www.rubypal.com) for details!
---
### Author:  [@John\_Carter](https://rubytalk.org/u/John_Carter)
#### Post date: [29 October 2007 03:33 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/whats-in-your-ruby-could-ruby-ever-be-a-g-p-dev-language/41675/5 "2007-10-29T03:33:38Z")
As one Old Fart to an Old Code Toad...
> What are you doing with ruby?
Everything they let me.
> What would you \*like\* to do with ruby?
Don't tell anyone, but a vast amount of legacy C/C++ code is just
really crappily written stuff for doing IO/ shifting strings / data
blocks. Supposedly they use C for efficiency. I bet I could port our
embedded app to Ruby and shrink it by about a factor of 20 and still
have it as responsive.
> Do you see ruby as a focal-point or general purpose language?
Definitely.
> Has anyone worked with ruby along side c++ ?
Stroustrup's stated Objective function in designing C++ was to
extended C to improve code reuse whilst adding the minimum number of
new keywords.
As a Quant you shouldn't take you much thought to see that that is a
wondrously truly crappy objective function for an optimization task!
> How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity?
Haven't tried, but just on general principles I do Lots of data
mining. But I don't use databases.
Databases are vastly complicated by the need to handle updates,
insertes, deletes and transactions.
For data mining working with a flat file snapshot can be a 100 times
faster!
John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632
PO Box 1645 Christchurch Email : john.carter@tait.co.nz
New Zealand
> **···**
>
> On Fri, 26 Oct 2007, CodeToad wrote:
---
### Author:  [@Dido\_Sevilla](https://rubytalk.org/u/Dido_Sevilla)
#### Post date: [30 October 2007 05:43 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/whats-in-your-ruby-could-ruby-ever-be-a-g-p-dev-language/41675/6 "2007-10-30T05:43:52Z")
> What are you doing with ruby?
Web stuff, with Rails, distributed programming, 9P2000/Styx work
interoperating with Plan 9 and Inferno, network monitoring,
telecommunications applications.
> What would you \*like\* to do with ruby?
Everything else I currently still do with PHP and C.
> Do you see ruby as a focal-point or general purpose language?
General purpose. In my experience, it's a language that combines the
best of both Perl and Lisp in an elegant package.
> **···**
>
> On 10/26/07, CodeToad \ wrote:
>
> --
> 普通じゃないのが当然なら答える私は何ができる？
> 普通でも普通じゃなくて感じるまま感じることだけをするよ！
> [http://stormwyrm.blogspot.com](http://stormwyrm.blogspot.com)
---
### Author:  [@Jorg\_W\_Mittag](https://rubytalk.org/u/Jorg_W_Mittag)
#### Post date: [26 October 2007 16:15 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/whats-in-your-ruby-could-ruby-ever-be-a-g-p-dev-language/41675/7 "2007-10-26T16:15:07Z")
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> CodeToad wrote:
>
> > Hi Folks,
> > I just finished my first 40+ hours with plain old Ruby (without rails
> > for now), and I love this stuff!! Everyone relates it to smalltalk,
> > and that seems mostly true.
> >
> > Being a Certified Old Dude (and sometimes a quant-heavy economist), it
> > does remind me of the pleasurable experience of learning serious
> > programming tripping along with smalltalk on one end and various lisp
> > incarnations on the other, circa xerox/parc days. So...
[...]
> > How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity?
>
> Never heard of it.
GemStone is going to port their kick-ass distributed, clustered,
transparent, orthogonal, object-persistance layer / object database
GemStone/S from Smalltalk to Rubinius (GemStone/R, anyone?), once
Rubinius hits 1.0 (December this year). That's looking to be \*very\*
interesting: \<[http://www.gemstone.com/products/smalltalk/>](http://www.gemstone.com/products/smalltalk/>);
jwm
---
### Author:  [@M\_Edward\_Ed\_Borasky1](https://rubytalk.org/u/M_Edward_Ed_Borasky1)
#### Post date: [29 October 2007 03:41 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/whats-in-your-ruby-could-ruby-ever-be-a-g-p-dev-language/41675/8 "2007-10-29T03:41:18Z")
John Carter wrote:
> Haven't tried, but just on general principles I do Lots of data
> mining. But I don't use databases.
>
> Databases are vastly complicated by the need to handle updates,
> insertes, deletes and transactions.
>
> For data mining working with a flat file snapshot can be a 100 times
> faster!
I haven't found that to be the case for the kind of data mining I do. Ruby, Perl, etc. are great for extracting the data into something like CSV format, but once you've got a CSV, or a bunch of CSVs, it's a lot faster to copy them into a database (PostgreSQL COPY is your friend -- INSERT is \*way\* too slow), index them and just throw queries at them.
---
### Author:  [@Terry\_Poulin](https://rubytalk.org/u/Terry_Poulin)
#### Post date: [29 October 2007 04:05 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/whats-in-your-ruby-could-ruby-ever-be-a-g-p-dev-language/41675/9 "2007-10-29T04:05:54Z")
> > What are you doing with ruby?
Having fun 🙂
> > What would you \*like\* to do with ruby?
Write a UNIX shell that works under Winsucks and can be used as a full login
shell under BSD/Linux/Unix -\> I was toying with this awhile back but lost time
to finish the basics.
Also as 'just for funs' I would like to write a (semi-toy) operating system
using Ruby and X86 Assembly / C (ISO/IEC 9899:1999). That takes POSIX into
consideration but provides a Ruby focused design. For the simple reason that I
would like to learn more about such things and I rather enjoy Ruby since I
don't like having to deal with some things in C
> > Do you see ruby as a focal-point or general purpose language?
Ruby is very useful for just about any thing
> > Has anyone worked with ruby along side c++ ?
Only if you count using QT/C++ Documentation for wqorking with QTRuby.
I generally use Ruby because I don't like C++ 😛
> > How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity?
Interesting idea...
TerryP.
> **···**
>
> --
>
> Email and shopping with the feelgood factor!
> 55% of income to good causes. [http://www.ippimail.com](http://www.ippimail.com)
---
### Author:  [@CodeToad](https://rubytalk.org/u/CodeToad)
#### Post date: [31 October 2007 14:45 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/whats-in-your-ruby-could-ruby-ever-be-a-g-p-dev-language/41675/10 "2007-10-31T14:45:24Z")
Hi Ed,
> CodeToad wrote:
[...snip...]
> \> What are you doing with ruby?
>
> Pretty much anything I can. At the moment I'm seeing how tightly I can
> tweak the interpreter using "standard" Gnu/Linux tricks.
Hope you write that up!
> \> What would you \*like\* to do with ruby?
>
> The "big bad project" is something called RAMEAU
> ([http://cougar.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/Rameau/Rameau.pdf\](http://cougar.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/Rameau/Rameau.pdf%5C)), which is
> really more like a Linux distro than a Ruby project, although all of the
> infrastructure above the (Gentoo) Linux level is in Ruby. But I have
> some smaller things I want to do as well.
[...snip...] because I can hack on existing Lisp code like AthenaCL
and Common Music.
Yea! Another Lisp Guy.
> When I do something numeric/statistical, I do it in R, and when I do
> scripting/DSL/etc., I do it in Ruby.
Me too. R/S/S+. Also use a lot of monte carlo and predictive/
constrained decision support, so I still pay decisioneering and @risk
in C++. I still really like to stick with oo.
> \> Do you see ruby as a focal-point or general purpose language?
>
> It's general purpose in the sense that it's a good combination of the
> best parts of Perl and Java. But it's not general purpose in the same
> sense as C or C++ -- yet. 🙂
I can't get over my general dislike for Java. Seems like a lot of work
to do anything done.
> \> Has anyone worked with ruby along side c++ ?
>
> There are plenty of interfaces to C++ code in Ruby -- most of the major
> C++ open source libraries have Ruby bindings, for example.
Found 'em and putting them to work!
> \> Has anyone tryed ruby with Qt4 ?
>
> There is an excellent Ruby library/binding for both Qt3 and Qt4.
>
> \> How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity?
>
> Never heard of it.
Fast, sweet, no more 00-to-relational mapping, just about zero DBA
work
some AI features built in. Eats huge amounts of XML. Likes smalltalk.
I've seen it used to create those huge node-and-branch maps. It seems
that a lot of 3 letter agencies use it quite a bit, which makes sense.
I can see it used well in economertics and regional data (not really
GIS). one of my few clients who pay on time brokers inetlllectual
property, and as far as I know I'm one of the few using american
options and I can easily see using something like that for the IP
work.
> **···**
>
> On Oct 25, 10:17 pm, "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" \ wrote:
>
> > \> Thanks,
> > \>OldCodeToad
> > \> TheOldCodeToad att gmaillll.commercial- Hide quoted text -
> >
> > - Show quoted text -
---
### Author:  [@Marc\_Heiler](https://rubytalk.org/u/Marc_Heiler)
#### Post date: [29 October 2007 13:13 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/whats-in-your-ruby-could-ruby-ever-be-a-g-p-dev-language/41675/11 "2007-10-29T13:13:16Z")
"What are you doing with ruby?"
Everything. Its my language for all tasks and I just laugh into the face
of anyone telling people to use the best tool for a given job (though I
\_partially\_ agree if speed is a big concern ... ) 😉
"What would you \*like\* to do with ruby?"
An OS with much more ruby and objects instead of ugly C, shell scripts
and perl everywhere all over the place. A gimp-like image manipulation
program in ruby. Audio Generation via objects/piping. A way to easily
use ruby similar to how .php was used (and gained popularity despite
being a bad language). Recommend it to other people and for this have
much better online docs.
Use ruby much more for creating game content (as "scripting language").
Hmm i think i forgot a lot of stuff... well my todo list is full with
things...
"Do you see ruby as a focal-point or general purpose language?"
General purpose. But in some areas it could need a little specialized
purpose attention IMHO ... 😉
"Has anyone worked with ruby along side c++ ?"
Not me. A bit C+Ruby but C is so incredibly boring ...
"Has anyone tryed ruby with Qt4 ?"
Yes, Qt4 does IMHO look even better than gtk, but I am too lazy to
scrape
together all info about qt4. They need a wiki, I keep on telling them
this,
but as long as they dont have a wiki i just recommend people to use
ruby-gtk.
(Btw just so that there is no misunderstanding, the guy behind ruby-qt
is very
nice, friendly and helpful.)
"How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity?"
Dunno... never had a need for a huge database anyway. Just some sqlite
but
for my stuff, generating yaml is just fine... (But on my todo list is
a database
> **···**
>
> --
> Posted via [http://www.ruby-forum.com/](http://www.ruby-forum.com/).
---
### Author:  [@M\_Edward\_Ed\_Borasky1](https://rubytalk.org/u/M_Edward_Ed_Borasky1)
#### Post date: [1 November 2007 05:08 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/whats-in-your-ruby-could-ruby-ever-be-a-g-p-dev-language/41675/12 "2007-11-01T05:08:23Z")
Quoting CodeToad \:
> Hi Ed,
>
> > CodeToad wrote:
>
> [...snip...]
>
> > \> What are you doing with ruby?
> >
> > Pretty much anything I can. At the moment I'm seeing how tightly I can
> > tweak the interpreter using "standard" Gnu/Linux tricks.
>
> Hope you write that up!
Part of it is going to be on the RubyConf 2007 agenda -- to be continued, of course. 🙂
> [...snip...] because I can hack on existing Lisp code like AthenaCL
> and Common Music.
>
> Yea! Another Lisp Guy.
If I absolutely positively had to pick one language forever, it would probably be "a Lisp", although which one I can't say. I'm leaning towards Scheme.
> **···**
>
> > On Oct 25, 10:17 pm, "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" \ \> wrote:
---
### Author:  [@Forum](https://rubytalk.org/u/Forum)
#### Post date: [29 October 2007 13:28 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/whats-in-your-ruby-could-ruby-ever-be-a-g-p-dev-language/41675/13 "2007-10-29T13:28:13Z")
you are wrong, because you \*are\* using the best tool for a given job;
not your fault that it's always named ruby 🙂
\
Robert
> **···**
>
> On 10/29/07, Marc Heiler \ wrote:
>
> > "What are you doing with ruby?"
> > Everything. Its my language for all tasks and I just laugh into the face
> > of anyone telling people to use the best tool for a given job
>
> --
> what do I think about Ruby?
> [http://ruby-smalltalk.blogspot.com/](http://ruby-smalltalk.blogspot.com/)