Re: ruby

[Lennon Day-Reynolds <address@hidden>]

Actually, after a fairly interesting debate with Dan Sugalski over 
whether Ruby would be the "next big thing," I downloaded the 
current stable release, along with several of the tutorial 
documents. The distribution got a few extra points with me for 
building on OS X "out of the box," as it were, but fell short in a 
number of areas I've come to rely on with Python and Perl.

First, like all new (for some value of 'new') languages, there is a 
lack of a single, logical path you can use to learn and begin 
experimenting with Ruby. Python has the online tutorial, and Perl 
has the Camel Book, and while I'm sure that Ruby will be there 
soon, I didn't get the same sense of guidance and support starting 
out with the language. There is also the 'new' language issue of 
library support; while I'm sure that there are, say, XML parsers, 
profilers, etc. out there, the time I spend digging for them, 
rather than just checking the standard library documentation or 
going to CPAN, is time that could have been spend writing code.

Secondly, and more fundamentally, I find it much harder to get 
excited about a language that's strictly OO. I fled Java for that 
very reason -- there are a lot of projects I do which either don't 
require the extra scaffolding of an OO system, are better written 
in a functional style, etc. I realize that you *can* write Ruby 
"scripts," which look just like procedural code, but even in the 
tutorial documentation, it's admitted that those functions are 
simply being added to the 'Object' class, from which all other 
classes are derived.

There are some pieces of the language that I prefer to Python 
(which is what I find myself doing more and more development in):
1. Easy 'block' syntax: since Python's version of 'lambda' only 
supports a single statement as its body, rather than a suite, I 
often have to define named, locally-visible functions instead.
2. Generators/iterators: these are in Python 2.2, but it's going to 
be at least several months after the upcoming 2.2 stable release 
before I'll be able to reliably distribute any code that relies on 
them.
3. C API: I've looked at the source for several Ruby extension 
modules written in C, and the API is much cleaner than it is with 
Python.

In short, I find Ruby quite interesting, but I haven't really seen 
a class of tasks for which it would be significantly more efficient 
or pleasant to code in than Python or Perl, even if the conceptual 
model is a little cleaner. Of course, if I were really worried 
about the semantics of my daily workhorse language, I'd be using 
Scheme, right? ;)


Lennon Day-Reynolds
Software Engineer
Kestrel Institute