[NMLUG] Ruby

[dwilde1 at gmail.com (Don Wilde)]

I agree, and for the same reasons. Perl references are nightmarish to
change to add new features. With all the years of programming I have
behind me, I still shut my eyes and guess what the hell's going to
come out. In Ruby, .inspect is your friend. Makes print seem
amateurish. I'm doing a monster parser/solver for SPICE equations
(chip semiconductor parameters) at work, and in Ruby it's done in the
raw language and it's 50x faster than Perl with Parse::RecDescent. I
suspect that far fewer modules will be necessary for Ruby, as it's
easier to program in the raw language than Perl is.

That's why I bought the Rails book, I have been using PHP in my
business for web and Perl/HTML::Embperl at SNL, and both are lacking.
PHP is not high-level enough and P/EP is just messy.

On 8/12/05, Matthew Paul Bohnsack <bohnsack@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm also impressed with Ruby.  I have a C and then Perl background,
> and tried and gave up on Python, but I've been working through the
> pickaxe and Rails books over the last couple of months.  Almost since
> the day I began, 95% of my "new stuff" has been done in Ruby.  Going
> back to do fixup and feature work in my production Perl is now an
> enlightening experience - I can see the difference in a powerful way:
> the Perl seems ugly and riddled with unnecessary cruft by comparison.
> 
> Perl still has a clear edge with its CPAN, but I predict this benefit
> wane in the next year or so, as Ruby seems to have a powerful
> momentum.
> 
> Rails and its ActiveRecord object-relational mapping (ORM) facility is
> the killer app for me though.  You listen to the hype and you
> understand it on a certain level, but you don't really become a rabid
> believer, until you do start to do stuff in 1/10 the time it used to
> take.
> 
> irb (Ruby's interactive shell) is another thing that you can't live
> without, once you become accustomed to having that kind of tool
> available.
> 
> Another thing I've really enjoyed is the way learning Ruby has made me
> a better Perl programmer. Frequently using the iterator and block
> idioms so common in Ruby code
> (http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/CollectionClosureMethod.html), has
> enabled me to more effectively use Perl's grep(), map(), and sort(),
> where I used to most commonly use a less consise for loop.
> 
> But the best part of Ruby is is the fun - it's fun to program in Ruby!
> 
> Any other new Rubyists out there?
> -
> Matt Bohnsack
> http://bohnsack.com/
> 
> On 8/12/05, Don Wilde <dwilde1@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Have been doing some good work with Ruby these days. Anybody else out
> > there as impressed as I am? I just bought a book about Rails and
> > haven't started it, but the core Ruby language is so much clearer than
> > Perl that in a comparison I'd have to call Perl a has-been except for
> > CPAN. Thoughts?
> >
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