I love Ruby but what is the deal with... this !

[Ruby Maniac]

I love Ruby but what is the deal with the lack of a VM ?

I love Ruby but what is the deal with the lack of performance ?

Why does FreeBASIC run faster than my lovely Ruby code ?

Why do I have to ship source code with my Ruby app ?

Does this mean I have no choice but to develop Open Source Code
forever using Ruby ?

How will I ever be able to make any money coding Ruby when I have to
ship source code to all my customers ?

Why have all other languages that attempted to be commercial successes
failed because programmers had to ship source code with their apps for
those languages ? (*Check the history of Smalltalk*)

Where the heck is Ruby 1.9.0 for crying out-loud, I mean it's going on
2 years and still no stable Ruby 1.9.0 for me to play with at work !

I want to use Ruby for absolutely everything !

I want Ruby to be the only computer language anyone can legally use in
the USA !

I want to run for congress to get a law passed to make Ruby the
national programming language.

I want all other Moneky Coders like me to have to use the lovely Ruby
code I love to write !

Ruby Rocks ! (*Pass me another Red Bull so I can get back to work
writing more Ruby code !*)

 

[Gregory Seidman]

I love Ruby but what is the deal with the lack of a VM ?
I love Ruby but what is the deal with the lack of performance ?
Why does FreeBASIC run faster than my lovely Ruby code ?

Ruby is a language written to scratch someone's (Matz) itch. It happens to
be quite nice as a language, but its development isn't driven by corporate
concerns or corporate money.

Why do I have to ship source code with my Ruby app ?

You don't. Check out rubyscript2exe, among other things.

Does this mean I have no choice but to develop Open Source Code
forever using Ruby ?
How will I ever be able to make any money coding Ruby when I have to
ship source code to all my customers ?

Absolutely not. Just because you ship source code doesn't mean that the
code is not protected by copyright laws. Indeed, if not for copyright
protection there would be no such thing as open source licenses, since they
depend upon copyright law protecting the source code. If you wish to
develop an application and make it available under a license that allows
only single use on a single processor machine with less than 1GB of RAM and
only on alternate Tuesdays, you are free to do so and the license (should
anyone enter into such a licensing agreement with you) is enforceable.

Why have all other languages that attempted to be commercial successes
failed because programmers had to ship source code with their apps for
those languages ? (*Check the history of Smalltalk*)

Smalltalk may or may not have attempted to be a commercial success. As of
now, Ruby is *not* attempting to become a commercial success, except
insofar as Microsoft is supporting/pushing IronRuby (which does have a VM
since it involves a Ruby to CLR bytecode compiler).

Where the heck is Ruby 1.9.0 for crying out-loud, I mean it's going on
2 years and still no stable Ruby 1.9.0 for me to play with at work !

As far as I know, Ruby development is following a versioning scheme similar
to what Linux development used to follow. That is, odd-numbered point
releases are unstable. When it is stable it will be called 2.0 (last I
heard, anyway).

I want to use Ruby for absolutely everything !
I want Ruby to be the only computer language anyone can legally use in
the USA !
I want to run for congress to get a law passed to make Ruby the
national programming language.
I want all other Moneky Coders like me to have to use the lovely Ruby
code I love to write !

If you really mean any of that, you are a fool. Ruby is a single language,
a single tool. It is the right tool for many jobs, but not for all jobs.
Don't limit yourself. If you are unhappy with the state of Ruby right now,
take a break from it and learn some other languages (my suggestions:
Lisp/Scheme, Erlang, Haskell, OCAML, C, C++, C#, PostScript, MIPS assembly,
SPARC assembly, x86 assembly, and not necessarily in that order) to broaden
the set of tools in your toolbox.

Ruby Rocks ! (*Pass me another Red Bull so I can get back to work
writing more Ruby code !*)

Ruby is the most pleasant language I've ever used. It also has its warts.
Have a little perspective.

--Greg

 

[Ruby Maniac]

Ruby is a language written to scratch someone's (Matz) itch. It happens to
be quite nice as a language, but its development isn't driven by corporate
concerns or corporate money.


You don't. Check out rubyscript2exe, among other things.


Absolutely not. Just because you ship source code doesn't mean that the
code is not protected by copyright laws. Indeed, if not for copyright
protection there would be no such thing as open source licenses, since they
depend upon copyright law protecting the source code. If you wish to
develop an application and make it available under a license that allows
only single use on a single processor machine with less than 1GB of RAM and
only on alternate Tuesdays, you are free to do so and the license (should
anyone enter into such a licensing agreement with you) is enforceable.


Smalltalk may or may not have attempted to be a commercial success. As of
now, Ruby is *not* attempting to become a commercial success, except
insofar as Microsoft is supporting/pushing IronRuby (which does have a VM
since it involves a Ruby to CLR bytecode compiler).


As far as I know, Ruby development is following a versioning scheme similar
to what Linux development used to follow. That is, odd-numbered point
releases are unstable. When it is stable it will be called 2.0 (last I
heard, anyway).


If you really mean any of that, you are a fool. Ruby is a single language,
a single tool. It is the right tool for many jobs, but not for all jobs.
Don't limit yourself. If you are unhappy with the state of Ruby right now,
take a break from it and learn some other languages (my suggestions:
Lisp/Scheme, Erlang, Haskell, OCAML, C, C++, C#, PostScript, MIPS assembly,
SPARC assembly, x86 assembly, and not necessarily in that order) to broaden
the set of tools in your toolbox.


Ruby is the most pleasant language I've ever used. It also has its warts.
Have a little perspective.

--Greg

I was not able to get rubyscript2exe to work when I gave it a whirl.

Once upon a time, Smalltalk was a commercially successful language
with several public companies selling it but then one day Smalltalk
fell into disrepute and all those public companies ceased to be public
companies and now Smalltalk is largely Open Source and no longer a
commercial success. One of the problems with Smalltalk was the fact
that source code had to be shipped with Smalltalk apps.

Copyright Laws do NOT protect you from reverse engineering regardless
of what the License Agreement says, reverse engineering is a time
honored art that is fully supported by current copyright laws.

Believe it or not, reverse engineering is a bit easier when you have
full source to play with... I just thought I would toss this out for
all of us to ponder.

Even when rubyscript2exe is successfully used the source code is still
available and must be available or Ruby cannot work.

I love Ruby ! I want this made perfectly clear.

I seriously want Ruby used for every single programming problem known
to mankind and I will hate all those who fail to live up to this
ideal. Maybe I am just a lazy programmer who doesn't want to learn
any new languages but I love Ruby so much I cannot stand to even be in
the same room with anyone who even mentions any other languages other
than Ruby.

You call me foolish because I use Ruby for everything but I think I am
a genius with a vision.

Recently I was given the task of importing data from one SQL Server
2005 database to another and rather than allow a co-worker use C# to
code a faster way to accomplish this I chose to use Ruby even though
the work took weeks to complete and that Moron who wanted to use C#
might have completed the work in less than a day I know Ruby as a
superior language is well worth the weeks of time my team has invested
in the process or doing a rather simple data import task. Ruby rocks !

 

[Walter Purvis]

Troll.

 

[Rob Sanheim]

Please don't feed the trolls. Move along...nothing to see here.

 

[Ruby Maniac]

Troll.

Do you classify all those who have an opposing viewpoint as being a
"Troll" ?

 

[Phlip]

Do you classify all those who have an opposing viewpoint as being a

"Troll" ?

Classify someone who writes posts only to stir up trouble as a troll.
Example: Posting "Perl sucks" to a Perl newsgroup. If someone actually
had a valid question, they could phrase it more diplomatically, such
as "Perl has room for improvement".

So lack of this diplomacy is a very clear indicator someone doesn't
actually care about the answer.

 

[Ruby Maniac]

Classify someone who writes posts only to stir up trouble as a troll.
Example: Posting "Perl sucks" to a Perl newsgroup. If someone actually
had a valid question, they could phrase it more diplomatically, such
as "Perl has room for improvement".

So lack of this diplomacy is a very clear indicator someone doesn't
actually care about the answer.

Well pardon me for causing "trouble" simply by talking about the
inefficiencies of Ruby... If the Ruby community weren't so sensitive
about this sort of topic we might well have a more powerful (faster,
more efficient) Ruby language to use. Punishing those who talk about
Ruby's inefficiencies will not resolve those inefficiencies however it
will work to guarantee those sides of Ruby remain ingrained in the
langauge as has been the case for a very long while, it seems.

 

[Phlip]

Well pardon me for causing "trouble" simply by talking about the

inefficiencies of Ruby... If the Ruby community weren't so sensitive
about this sort of topic we might well have a more powerful (faster,
more efficient) Ruby language to use.

(Another trolloid technique is frequently returning to appeasement and
abasement, but I'll make one more attempt at rationality here!)

You just said "if the newsgroup weren't so civilized, and demanding of
polite discourse, Ruby might be a better language."

That's kind'a silly.

 

[John Joyce]

We know how slow it is and whether or not it is important.
We're not really worried about it, but we do look forward to upcoming
speed increases..
What we are generally interested in is doing things and making things
with Ruby
Focus on that, and you'll find that Ruby is either good or not for you.
People here generally use other languages as well, and are not Ruby
only people.
We appreciate Ruby because of other languages in many cases.
There is actually a great deal of pragmatism in the Ruby community.
If there is a better approach that is not Ruby we will recommend it
and use it.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Well pardon me for causing "trouble" simply by talking about the
inefficiencies of Ruby... If the Ruby community weren't so sensitive
about this sort of topic we might well have a more powerful (faster,
more efficient) Ruby language to use. Punishing those who talk about
Ruby's inefficiencies will not resolve those inefficiencies however it
will work to guarantee those sides of Ruby remain ingrained in the
langauge as has been the case for a very long while, it seems.

First of all, nobody is punishing anyone as far as I can tell. I see
name calling, but nobody has punished anyone yet. Second, a number of
people in the Ruby community, myself among them, *are* working to
improve Ruby performance *and* to promote the concepts of profiling,
load and scalability testing, and software performance engineering. Yes,
we *are* sensitive about it, and we *will* have a more powerful Ruby
language *because* of that sensitivity.

Now if you'd like to help out, email me off list and I'll give you some
pointers on what this performance engineering business is all about. Or,
if you want to help the Python community improve their speed, go over to
their mailing lists and I'm sure someone will hand you some tasks.

 

[Curt Sampson]

Once upon a time, Smalltalk was a commercially successful language....

Well, that's debatable. It all depends on where you set your bar;
Smalltalk was never all that widely deployed.

If measured by the number of dollars paid to programmers to write code
over any given period of time, I would not be suprised if at this point
Ruby is more "commerically successful" than Smalltalk ever was. It's
important not to forget that a vast amount of programming is done not to
make products which are sold to others but for internal consumption. In
fact, this appeared to me to be the majority of Smalltalk use.

One of the problems with Smalltalk was the fact that source code had
to be shipped with Smalltalk apps.

Actually, there were several implementations where it didn't; you could
build a system image and just ship that. It was likely more difficult to
reverse engineeer than Java bytecode.

At any rate, you could have a nice argument over whether this was
the biggest problem for commerical Smalltalk development. The vastly
different development and build control environment (particularly that
it was not file-based) could well have contributed more than that.

Believe it or not, reverse engineering is a bit easier when you have
full source to play with... I just thought I would toss this out for
all of us to ponder.

No! Say it isn't so! None of us here had ever realized that!

Basically, distributing the source code just isn't that big a problem
for many people, and it seems to include you, or you would be using
another language, wouldn't you?

Every language has its tradeoffs, and if you're not happy with Ruby's,
you'd be far better off either fixing the problems (it is open source,
after all) or finding a language whose tradeoffs more suit you than
by ranting on a mailing list. I can say almost for certain that this
discussion will eat a lot of your time to no good end.

You might keep in mind that most of the Ruby developers are pretty well
aware of the problems with Ruby, and it's not because of their lack of
knowledge of these problems that they're not fixed. I leave it to you as
an exercise to find out why your pet peeves are not yet fixed.

cjs

 

[Ruby Maniac]

(Another trolloid technique is frequently returning to appeasement and
abasement, but I'll make one more attempt at rationality here!)

You just said "if the newsgroup weren't so civilized, and demanding of
polite discourse, Ruby might be a better language."

That's kind'a silly.

So who specifically would my remarks be offending, assuming I was
being less than civil in this thread ?

 

[Ruby Maniac]

We know how slow it is and whether or not it is important.
We're not really worried about it, but we do look forward to upcoming
speed increases..
What we are generally interested in is doing things and making things
with Ruby
Focus on that, and you'll find that Ruby is either good or not for you.
People here generally use other languages as well, and are not Ruby
only people.
We appreciate Ruby because of other languages in many cases.
There is actually a great deal of pragmatism in the Ruby community.
If there is a better approach that is not Ruby we will recommend it
and use it.

The feeling that there is only one tool for all tasks generally leads
to the failure to recognize the right tool for the right job.

I have a nice big basket of languages I can draw upon when making
assessments as to which one might be best suited to a particular task
rather than only using one language for everything at the expense of
he who employs me since it can take quite some time to make Ruby work
in place of a better method for coding stored procs such as when SQL
Server 2005 is being used and C# might be a better choice in terms of
runtime performance.

 

[Ruby Maniac]

Most of the warts *I've* seen on Ruby are things it "inherited" from
Perl, like "$_".

Seems to me like Ruby borrowed far more from Smalltalk than Perl and
we know how Smalltalk failed to remain a success in the marketplace.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Well, that's debatable. It all depends on where you set your bar;
Smalltalk was never all that widely deployed.

Once upon a time, there were *two* -- or was it three? -- Lisp machines.
They existed ... they had revenues and users and all that. Once upon a
time, Paul Graham wrote an e-commerce application in Lisp that he sold
to Yahoo, who then re-wrote it in C/C++.

Was Lisp a "commercial success?" Hardly.

If measured by the number of dollars paid to programmers to write code
over any given period of time, I would not be suprised if at this point
Ruby is more "commerically successful" than Smalltalk ever was. It's
important not to forget that a vast amount of programming is done not to
make products which are sold to others but for internal consumption. In
fact, this appeared to me to be the majority of Smalltalk use.

I personally think that it is almost always a mistake to do "a vast
amount of programming ... not to make products which are sold to others
but for internal consumption". Programmers should be paid to produce
software that fills profitable markets, not to do infrastructure
projects that could be done using off-the-shelf software.

I personally think if you need software infrastructure, you should
document your requirements and select a product from one of three (or
more) vendors that can meet them. If there *aren't* three vendors that
can meet them, your requirements need to be re-done.

 

[Marc Heiler]

Ruby Maniac, please stop the ruby-is-slow crusade for a little while.
By now we are really aware of your opinion, and this is now the fourth
starting message about the SAME topic in a short time.

 

[Michael Glaesemann]

Ruby Maniac, please stop the ruby-is-slow crusade for a little while.

Marc (and others),

A killfile is a wonderful thing. I haven't seen anything from Ruby
Maniac in a couple of days. I've seen a number of people *complain*
about him, but hopefully that will subside soon enough.

Michael Glaesemann
grzm seespotcode net

 

[Gregory Seidman]

The feeling that there is only one tool for all tasks generally leads
to the failure to recognize the right tool for the right job.

I have a nice big basket of languages I can draw upon when making
assessments as to which one might be best suited to a particular task
rather than only using one language for everything at the expense of
he who employs me since it can take quite some time to make Ruby work
in place of a better method for coding stored procs such as when SQL
Server 2005 is being used and C# might be a better choice in terms of
runtime performance.

Okay, here's where I'm ready to call troll. Compare and contrast the
paragraph above with this quote from a previous message by "Ruby Maniac":

Recently I was given the task of importing data from one SQL Server
2005 database to another and rather than allow a co-worker use C#
to code a faster way to accomplish this I chose to use Ruby even
though the work took weeks to complete and that Moron who wanted to
use C# might have completed the work in less than a day I know Ruby
as a superior language is well worth the weeks of time my team has
invested in the process or doing a rather simple data import task.
Ruby rocks !

Yeah. That'd be a direct contradiction.

*plonk*

--Greg

 

[Curt Sampson]

I personally think that it is almost always a mistake to do "a vast
amount of programming ... not to make products which are sold to others
but for internal consumption". Programmers should be paid to produce
software that fills profitable markets, not to do infrastructure
projects that could be done using off-the-shelf software.

This sounds like an opinion held firmly enough that it's unswayable, but
just in case you care to contemplate it, I'll tell you why I disagree.

In my world, at least, programming is cheap. Solving problems can be
expensive and difficult, but the coding aspect of that is generally
fairly trivial. In fact, due to the flexability you have when writing
custom software, it can be easier than trying to configure a commerical
package.

Another way of looking at it is that all that time you spend tweaking
XML configuration files is just another form of programming anyway. Why
not just do it in Ruby (or whatever) instead, if that's easier?

(This is not to say I don't use off-the-shelf software, BTW.)

cjs