Why Ruby?

Ruby
21

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 3:19 AM, Steven D’Aprano
[email protected] wrote:

On Tue, 30 Dec 2008 07:36:03 -0800, Phlip wrote:

Stephen, all I snipped away is very sensible stuff, however

Can you say, “anyone else would
have made the same choice”?
Will you not get fired if you say such a stupid thing? Oh I lost that
chess game and yet I mirrored every move of
my opponent. I believe it has been shown that the most dangerous and
most devastator projects are those which have not taken any risks and
all decisions have been taken in a conventional way. In other words,
where is the added value of a person that takes the choice anyone else
would have made?

There is one other thing. I believe that starting a project in Ruby
and having to fall back to a more conventional language is still time
well spent in a sound design process. It will not work the other way
round though. Choosing Java will become a final decision ( nowadays of
course JRuby and friends might offer an escape route after all :wink: very
quickly while choosing Ruby while leave you much more freedom of
choice later on.

Cheers
Robert

22

On Dec 30 2008, 2:30 pm, Nicholas W. [email protected]
wrote:

Umberto Eco
social engineering.
Try it if you have a chance.

ngw

p.s. sorry for the OT

–http://www.nofeed.org

How did abulafia end up in the Ruby thread ? I read all kinds of
kabbalah books myself for many years, but the last few years I have
been pretty heavily influenced by Parmahansa Yogananda …

23

On Jan 14, 2009, at 1:30 PM, Peter B. wrote:

The point being that the same patterns of behavior will recur.
So soon enough BigWig A will be playing gold with BigWig B
and will say,

I guess you HAVE to be a BigWig to play “gold” :wink:

-Rob

Rob B. http://agileconsultingllc.com
[email protected]

24

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 4:29 PM, Mike S. [email protected]
wrote:

Thanks Phlip.

If I add all the responses together I think we get Ruby can be
positioned for agile rapid applications, prototyping etc. Java is
typically more long-winded but suitable for big expensive structured
mainstream projects requiring all the bureacratic strategic
architectures and policies.
Why would Ruby misfit large structured projects (whatever mainstream
is, probably that part of the water racing fastest towards the falls)
as long TDD/BDD is applicable?

Cheers
Robert

25

I use Ruby daily at my place of employ. The company I work for is a
multi-billion dollar outfit. I’m not sure if I can name the name though.

The caveat to this is that my team is a very small component of this
company. That’s changing quickly though.

James

26

Of course ten years ago Mike could easily have been asking:

On Dec 30, 1998, at 2:44 AM, Mike S. wrote:

I have never seen or heard of Java in a corporate context. The single
exception (where I first came across it) was a supplier using a Java
applet
to animate text on his world wide web page.

If you supply services to corporates, what sort of case can you make
for
using Java rather than C++, which is in use everywhere? (I’m not
thinking of applets here, which is a rat

The point being that the same patterns of behavior will recur.
So soon enough BigWig A will be playing gold with BigWig B
and will say,
"You know we’ve got some great cost savings with
our push to Agile, especially the whole Ruby on Rails things,
what about you?
“Us, we’re looking at at it, not sure what results yet.”

Next Morning
“Smith, What are doing with Ruby on Rails?”
“er um, dont know”
“Well I don’t want to miss the boat on this thing, make sure we’re
taking it seriously, lets raise it at the next development managers
meeting …”

I can recall how hard it was to get people to take Java seriously.
I can also remember hearing “C++ is very pretty but it will never
replace Fortran”
And also, “You’re trying to do that in GW-Basic. Are you crazy?
Everyone knows that you can only do FFTs in Assembler. It will never
be fast enough on an interpreter!”

27

Hi everyone. I’m new to Ruby and have a question that I hope is
simple. I wanted to compare some strings for similarity, and found
this ruby gem called “english” (http://english.rubyforge.org/) which
has a method called “similarity” that gives me back a similarity score
when used. I wanted to know how that score is being calculated - and
I looked through the docs and couldn’t find it.

I’m wondering if there’s a way to easily “see” the code for a
particular method from a gem - can i somehow use irb to show me the
code for “similarity” to see how it is coming up with that score?

Thanks, and sorry if this is a silly newbie question.

28

I didn’t copy thread material, because my thought is not directed at
any one conversation, but I thought it would be appropriate to say
something in this thread.

Is it plausible people are using Agile development because modern day
consumer-type software has a half-life of about, umm, 3 hours? After
that, it has to be mended and/or replaced. In fact, the whole
paradigm in Ruby seems to be based on this premise.

I love the language, and will never stop using it, but Agile
development sounds very much like snake oil.

2c.

Todd

29

Thanks, and sorry if this is a silly newbie question.

Type

gem unpack english

It will unpack the gem into cwd and you can search the code.

–
“Configure complete, now type ‘make’ and PRAY.”

            (configure script of zsnes - www.zsnes.com)
30

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 06:15:15AM +0900, Todd B. wrote:

development sounds very much like snake oil.
Actually, my take is that some people realized that there are some
beneficial development practices that we should be using – but haven’t
really been using in any of the major development methodologies. These
people decided this was the Promised Land of development, and put
together a series of specific methodologies (most famous probably being
X-treme Programming), then they all noticed there are systemic
similarities to these different formal methodologies they all invented.

Next thing you know, they’re being marketed under the umbrella term
“Agile”.

Eventually, I think people will come to the realization that there are
some good things to be learned from this Agile stuff, but the specifics
of requiring that everybody pair up, or tack 3x5 cards to the wall, or
whatever, are less necessary. At that point, of course, some new people
will notice the dire necessity of a new set of development principles,
and the next run of the Next Big Methodology craze will happen.

Each of these waves will surely teach us some new and important things
about software development as a process – and each of them will, for a
short time, seem to be a Silver Bullet to a lot of people, before cooler
heads prevail and we start to see the difference between the specific
Methodology and the valuabe, generalized development principles.

. . . but I may just be full of it. Maybe Agile Methodologies are
really
where it’s at. Maybe it’s more tied to the current generation of
programming languages than anything else, and as long as we’re using
Ruby
we should just use an Agile Methodology. I’m certainly not the world’s
foremost expert.

Regardless, I don’t think that calling “Agile” a “snake oil” is really
accurate. While I’m no Grandmaster of Uber-Hackery, I’m pretty sure I
can recognize a few good principles of development now and then, and
there are at least a couple of them woven into what it means to be
“Agile”, at least according to the Agile Manifesto.

31

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Dan [email protected] wrote:

Thanks, and sorry if this is a silly newbie question.

http://gemedit.rubyforge.org/

32

Robert D. wrote:

Why would Ruby misfit large structured projects?

I didn’t mean to imply Java is stodgy and Ruby is fluid. It was just
that currently Java and C# are the corporate OO standards, so people
will always want to know why you’re not using one of those. You thus
have to use some spin; create some clear blue water. Rails is certainly
one way of getting around the Architecture Standards Manual but I guess
they’ll soon be a Java version if there isn’t one already.

33

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 5:34 PM, Mike S. [email protected]
wrote:

–
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Sorry Mike I must be on a different planet:(
Do we agree that Ruby is fit for large projects?
I on my side agree completely with what you say here, I probably
misunderstood something earlier on.
Cheers
Robert

34

Robert D. wrote:

Do we agree that Ruby is fit for large projects?

Someone famous - I suspect Abraham Lincoln - once said “If I had an hour
to chop
down a tree, I would spend 30 minutes sharpening my ax.” Or similar
numbers.

Some pointy-haired bosses out there don’t understand that metaphor. They
think
that the more strokes needed to chop down the tree, the more “progress”
we made.

That’s why stodgy languages that lead to huge line counts are very easy
to
market to them.

35

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Phlip [email protected] wrote:

“progress” we made.

That’s why stodgy languages that lead to huge line counts are very easy to
market to them.
Sure, but in the end all that counts will be the trees chopped down,
right :). Just to give myself some hope LOL.
And sorry for that terrible metaphor we do not want to kill any trees
down of course !!!
R.