New user questions

B

brundlefly76

I have been a production Perl programmer for about 10 years, and am
looking into tinkering with Ruby, and had a few questions:

1. I noticed Ruby was not installed by default on Suse 9.2 (although a
package was available in Yast). Does anyone have any information on
what Linux distributions *do* install Ruby by default, and any progress
on that? Because of the nature of my work, its not too convenient for
me to go installing interpreters on every machine I need to work on.

2. How fast do Ruby releases move - say in comparison to Perl? I cant
tell if it moves very slowly or simply has a versioning scheme that
belies this.

3. Is anyone here running Ruby in a production environment, and for
what applications?

4. Any Perl programmers have any comments on their experiences working
with Ruby?

Thanks for any info!
 
S

Stephan Kämper

brundlefly76 said:
I have been a production Perl programmer for about 10 years, and am
looking into tinkering with Ruby, and had a few questions:

1. I noticed Ruby was not installed by default on Suse 9.2 (although a
package was available in Yast). Does anyone have any information on
what Linux distributions *do* install Ruby by default, and any progress
on that? Because of the nature of my work, its not too convenient for
me to go installing interpreters on every machine I need to work on.

Can't tell you, sorry. As far as I am concerned I tend to make the
latest stable Ruby on new systems (unless they're Windows machines, then
I take the one-click-installer).
3. Is anyone here running Ruby in a production environment, and for
what applications?

See http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby
4. Any Perl programmers have any comments on their experiences working
with Ruby?

I used to do Perl and C++ programming when I first too notice of Ruby. I
wasn't too exited, mainly because I didn't understand the Japanese
documentation. Then some months later I found Dave & Andy's book
"Programming Ruby" (the pickaxe) in the local bookstore and instantly
got hooked.
I didn't have the feeling I actively learned Ruby. I learned that there
is a language out there that worked pretty much the way I think.
And I have to admit that *this* was not the way I got used to Perl (but
I have met people how say that it's just the other way round for them).

Happy rubying

Stephan
 
F

Florian Gross

brundlefly76 said:
I have been a production Perl programmer for about 10 years, and am
looking into tinkering with Ruby, and had a few questions:

1. I noticed Ruby was not installed by default on Suse 9.2 (although a
package was available in Yast). Does anyone have any information on
what Linux distributions *do* install Ruby by default, and any progress
on that? Because of the nature of my work, its not too convenient for
me to go installing interpreters on every machine I need to work on.

I can not say much about this as I'm not a Linux user by myself, but it
appears to me that installing Ruby via a package manager is still fairly
easy.
2. How fast do Ruby releases move - say in comparison to Perl? I cant
tell if it moves very slowly or simply has a versioning scheme that
belies this.

Ruby is usually released to the public on Christmas. See
http://redhanded.hobix.com/cult/sevenChristmases.html

There was talk about speeding releases up a bit, but the benefit of
doing it this ways is that Ruby releases usually are very stable. I've
even used release candidates without trouble via the wonderful one-click
installer.
3. Is anyone here running Ruby in a production environment, and for
what applications?

Of course. There's lots of usage samples on the RubyGarden Wiki:
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby

Ruby is because of RubyOnRails nowadays also getting used for running
websites like basecamphq.com, 43things.com, rubyonrails.org and so on.
See http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/show/DemoApps for a few more samples.
4. Any Perl programmers have any comments on their experiences working
with Ruby?

I've enjoyed the switch a lot. I assumed that Ruby was unlike Perl and I
suppose that helped with avoiding some of the potential gotchas. With
Ruby it was also natural to organize my applications in parts that
easily allowed for refactoring and reusing. The only reason I might have
today for using Perl over Ruby (I've not done this since quite a few
months) would be availability.
 
R

Robert Klemme

Florian Gross said:
brundlefly76 wrote:


I've enjoyed the switch a lot. I assumed that Ruby was unlike Perl and I
suppose that helped with avoiding some of the potential gotchas. With
Ruby it was also natural to organize my applications in parts that
easily allowed for refactoring and reusing. The only reason I might have
today for using Perl over Ruby (I've not done this since quite a few
months) would be availability.

+1

IMHO one of the major advantages of Ruby is that it's OO all over while
Perl's OO was retrofitted.

Kind regards

robert
 
P

Premshree Pillai

+1

IMHO one of the major advantages of Ruby is that it's OO all over while
Perl's OO was retrofitted.

Yep. Perl's OO sux0r. Ruby = bestOf(Perl, Python)
 
D

Dick Davies

* Robert Klemme said:
+1

IMHO one of the major advantages of Ruby is that it's OO all over while
Perl's OO was retrofitted.

Definitely, that's the seller. A lot of the gurus on the list build awesome
object frameworks with ruby - i just use it because it makes scripts easier
to type and read than perl. although enlightenment does seep into my head
by hanging about here too.

The OOP is *so* much better than perls (it's actually usable) that you can
take advantage of it even in a 25-line cron script while still
enjoying yourself.

As for the availability, it's easy to think 'well, i have perl already,
so I'll knock out a perl script' but that has bitten me so many times in
the last year (when someone wants a new feature) that my new year resolution
was to break the habit.

I finally put it on one of our servers last week
after wasting an hour trying to get perl oop back in its box. It was quicker
to download ruby (only 3Mb, I get emails from my manager bigger than that),
build it and rewrite the script (an apache server-status -> snmp bridge)
than to trawl around CPAN crying.

You don't even need root if you install it in ~/bin and if it gets the
job done in a morning rather than a week, who's going to care?
 
P

Premshree Pillai

Definitely, that's the seller. A lot of the gurus on the list build awesome
object frameworks with ruby - i just use it because it makes scripts easier
to type and read than perl. although enlightenment does seep into my head
by hanging about here too.

The OOP is *so* much better than perls (it's actually usable) that you can
take advantage of it even in a 25-line cron script while still
enjoying yourself.

As for the availability, it's easy to think 'well, i have perl already,
so I'll knock out a perl script' but that has bitten me so many times in
the last year (when someone wants a new feature) that my new year resolution
was to break the habit.

I finally put it on one of our servers last week
after wasting an hour trying to get perl oop back in its box. It was quicker
to download ruby (only 3Mb, I get emails from my manager bigger than that),
build it and rewrite the script (an apache server-status -> snmp bridge)
than to trawl around CPAN crying.

Heh, but that's no reason realy, is it? ;-)
 
M

Mohammad Khan

I have been a production Perl programmer for about 10 years, and am
looking into tinkering with Ruby, and had a few questions:

1. I noticed Ruby was not installed by default on Suse 9.2 (although a
package was available in Yast). Does anyone have any information on
what Linux distributions *do* install Ruby by default, and any progress
on that? Because of the nature of my work, its not too convenient for
me to go installing interpreters on every machine I need to work on.

2. How fast do Ruby releases move - say in comparison to Perl? I cant
tell if it moves very slowly or simply has a versioning scheme that
belies this.

3. Is anyone here running Ruby in a production environment, and for
what applications?

4. Any Perl programmers have any comments on their experiences working
with Ruby?

When I was introduced with ruby by my boss, I was using Perl for about
3+ years at that time. It was about 2 years back.
I am not using Perl for at least 18 months.

Mohammad
 
R

Robert Klemme

Mohammad Khan said:
When I was introduced with ruby by my boss, I was using Perl for about
3+ years at that time. It was about 2 years back.
I am not using Perl for at least 18 months.

So you're clean now. :)

robert
 
F

Florian Gross

Dick said:
It was quicker to download ruby (only 3Mb, I get emails from my
manager bigger than that),

Heh, good comparison. I'm pretty sure I'll have to steal it. :)
 
C

Csaba Henk

When I was introduced with ruby by my boss, I was using Perl for about
3+ years at that time. It was about 2 years back.
I am not using Perl for at least 18 months.

Where can one get a job with such a boss??

Csaba
 
B

Ben Giddings

Robert said:
IMHO one of the major advantages of Ruby is that it's OO all over while
Perl's OO was retrofitted.

Does anybody know offhand if Python's OO was retrofitted? I used Python
back in '97, but don't really remember the details too well. Python's
OO sure has that "tacked on" feel, what with the underscores and "self"
parameters and all, but maybe it was just a really odd design decision?

Ben
 
M

Michael Neumann

Ben said:
Does anybody know offhand if Python's OO was retrofitted? I used Python
back in '97, but don't really remember the details too well. Python's
OO sure has that "tacked on" feel, what with the underscores and "self"
parameters and all, but maybe it was just a really odd design decision?

Uhm, I used Python 1.5, somewhere in 1997 or 1998. At that time, not
everything was an object as it seems to be now (since Python 2.0).

Probably matz knows more about Python ;-)

Regards,

Michael
 
Z

Zach Dennis

Michael said:
Uhm, I used Python 1.5, somewhere in 1997 or 1998. At that time, not
everything was an object as it seems to be now (since Python 2.0).

Probably matz knows more about Python ;-)

If we get lucky, Gabriel Renzi will post to this topic...

Zach
 
B

Ben Giddings

Michael said:
Uhm, I used Python 1.5, somewhere in 1997 or 1998. At that time, not
everything was an object as it seems to be now (since Python 2.0).

Oh, I know that not everything was an object up until Python 2.4 (or
maybe 2.3), what I'm wondering about is whether the first few versions
of Python had *any* object-oriented stuff.

It seems odd to me that if they were designing Python to be
object-oriented from day 1, that they'd use such an odd syntax for the
OO stuff (the self parameter, the double-underscore things, etc).

Ben
 
R

ruby talk

Does anybody know offhand if Python's OO was retrofitted? I used Python
back in '97, but don't really remember the details too well. Python's
OO sure has that "tacked on" feel, what with the underscores and "self"
parameters and all, but maybe it was just a really odd design decision?

Accordin to http://www.network-theory.co.uk/docs/pylang/ref_103.html
"Python was created in the early 1990s by Guido van Rossum at
Stichting Mathematisch Centrum (CWI) in the Netherlands as a successor
of a language called ABC. "

Also, http://www.artima.com/intv/python2.html
" Guido van Rossum: In the early 1980s, I worked as an implementer on
a team building a language called ABC at Centrum voor Wiskunde en
Informatica (CWI). I don't know how well people know ABC's influence
on Python. I try to mention ABC's influence because I'm indebted to
everything I learned during that project and to the people who worked
on it."

"ABC's design had a very clear, sharp focus. ABC was intended to be a
programming language that could be taught to intelligent computer
users who were not computer programmers or software developers in any
sense. "

http://rds.yahoo.com/S=79143:D1/CS=...ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(programming)

I get the sense that the main goal in Python was not to build an OO
language, but to employ OO concepts (and others) to the extent that
they help create a language suitable for beginners. It seems that if
theory or design purity would get in the way of a newbie quickly
picking up the language, then theory + purity got chucked.

Perhaps Python could be thought of as a excellent attempt to clean up ABC?
 
J

Jos Backus

It seems odd to me that if they were designing Python to be
object-oriented from day 1, that they'd use such an odd syntax for the
OO stuff (the self parameter, the double-underscore things, etc).

Since I thought it odd too, I asked Guido about the self parameter at an SVLUG
meeting a while ago. His answer was (hope I paraphrase this right) that it
should be possible to add a function as a method to a class outside of that
class, in which case you'd need to be able to specify the receiver. Doing it
this way makes it trivially possible to do this without coming up with any new
syntax.

--
Jos Backus _/ _/_/_/ Sunnyvale, CA
_/ _/ _/
_/ _/_/_/
_/ _/ _/ _/
jos at catnook.com _/_/ _/_/_/ require 'std/disclaimer'
 
G

Glenn Parker

" Guido van Rossum:
"ABC's design had a very clear, sharp focus. ABC was intended to be a
programming language that could be taught to intelligent computer
users who were not computer programmers or software developers in any
sense. "

Why does this description remind me of another (infamous) language... COBOL?
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Members online

No members online now.

Forum statistics

Threads
473,744
Messages
2,569,484
Members
44,903
Latest member
orderPeak8CBDGummies

Latest Threads

Top