What's in YOUR Ruby??? Could Ruby ever be a g.p. dev language?

[CodeToad]

Hi Folks,
I just finished my first 40+ hours with plain old Ruby (without rails
for now), and I love this stuff!! Everyone relates it to smalltalk,
and that seems mostly true.

Being a Certified Old Dude (and sometimes a quant-heavy economist), it
does remind me of the pleasurable experience of learning serious
programming tripping along with smalltalk on one end and various lisp
incarnations on the other, circa xerox/parc days. So...

What are you doing with ruby?
What would you *like* to do with ruby?
Do you see ruby as a focal-point or general purpose language?
Has anyone worked with ruby along side c++ ?
Has anyone tryed ruby with Qt4 ?
How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity?

Thanks,
OldCodeToad
TheOldCodeToad att gmaillll.commercial

 

[Robert Dober]

Hi Folks,
I just finished my first 40+ hours with plain old Ruby (without rails
for now), and I love this stuff!! Everyone relates it to smalltalk,
and that seems mostly true.

Being a Certified Old Dude (and sometimes a quant-heavy economist), it
does remind me of the pleasurable experience of learning serious
programming tripping along with smalltalk on one end and various lisp
incarnations on the other, circa xerox/parc days. So...

What are you doing with ruby?

lots of metaprogramming, text processing, ssh and telnet clients, Webservers
DSL, XML parsing and even OLE for Word document creation and Excel parsing.
And yes of course mission critical SW for a spacecraft

or general purpose language? GP
Has anyone worked with ruby along side c++ ? nope
Has anyone tryed ruby with Qt4 ? nope )
How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity? no idea

Thanks,
OldCodeToad
TheOldCodeToad att gmaillll.commercial

R.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Hi Folks,
I just finished my first 40+ hours with plain old Ruby (without rails
for now), and I love this stuff!! Everyone relates it to smalltalk,
and that seems mostly true.

Being a Certified Old Dude (and sometimes a quant-heavy economist), it
does remind me of the pleasurable experience of learning serious
programming tripping along with smalltalk on one end and various lisp
incarnations on the other, circa xerox/parc days. So...

What are you doing with ruby?

Pretty much anything I can. At the moment I'm seeing how tightly I can
tweak the interpreter using "standard" Gnu/Linux tricks.

What would you *like* to do with ruby?

The "big bad project" is something called RAMEAU
(http://cougar.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/Rameau/Rameau.pdf), which is
really more like a Linux distro than a Ruby project, although all of the
infrastructure above the (Gentoo) Linux level is in Ruby. But I have
some smaller things I want to do as well.

What I tend to do is pick the "native language" for any given project.
So when I work in algorithmic composition, I tend to do it in Lisp, even
though the sort of things I do would work in almost any language. That's
because I can hack on existing Lisp code like AthenaCL and Common Music.
When I do something numeric/statistical, I do it in R, and when I do
scripting/DSL/etc., I do it in Ruby.

Do you see ruby as a focal-point or general purpose language?

It's general purpose in the sense that it's a good combination of the
best parts of Perl and Java. But it's not general purpose in the same
sense as C or C++ -- yet.

Has anyone worked with ruby along side c++ ?

There are plenty of interfaces to C++ code in Ruby -- most of the major
C++ open source libraries have Ruby bindings, for example.

Has anyone tryed ruby with Qt4 ?

There is an excellent Ruby library/binding for both Qt3 and Qt4.

How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity?

Never heard of it.

 

[David A. Black]

Hi --

Hi Folks,
I just finished my first 40+ hours with plain old Ruby (without rails
for now), and I love this stuff!! Everyone relates it to smalltalk,
and that seems mostly true.
Welcome!

Being a Certified Old Dude (and sometimes a quant-heavy economist), it
does remind me of the pleasurable experience of learning serious
programming tripping along with smalltalk on one end and various lisp
incarnations on the other, circa xerox/parc days. So...

What are you doing with ruby?

Programming, authoring, training, consulting.... I would say that in
my own day-to-day, non-public stuff, text processing looms very large
in my Ruby use.

What would you *like* to do with ruby?

I'm still mining it for what it's already able to let me do.

Do you see ruby as a focal-point or general purpose language?

I'm not sure what you mean by focal point. I've certainly focused on
it It's definitely best described as a general-purpose programming
language -- not all-purpose (the quant-heavy economist in you might
not use it for everything), but certainly not specialized on any one
problem domain.


David

--
Upcoming training by David A. Black/Ruby Power and Light, LLC:
* Advancing With Rails, Edison, NJ, November 6-9
* Advancing With Rails, Berlin, Germany, November 19-22
* Intro to Rails, London, UK, December 3-6 (by Skills Matter)
See http://www.rubypal.com for details!

 

[Jörg W Mittag]

Hi Folks,
I just finished my first 40+ hours with plain old Ruby (without rails
for now), and I love this stuff!! Everyone relates it to smalltalk,
and that seems mostly true.

Being a Certified Old Dude (and sometimes a quant-heavy economist), it
does remind me of the pleasurable experience of learning serious
programming tripping along with smalltalk on one end and various lisp
incarnations on the other, circa xerox/parc days. So... [...]
How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity?

Never heard of it.

GemStone is going to port their kick-ass distributed, clustered,
transparent, orthogonal, object-persistance layer / object database
GemStone/S from Smalltalk to Rubinius (GemStone/R, anyone?), once
Rubinius hits 1.0 (December this year). That's looking to be *very*
interesting: <http://www.gemstone.com/products/smalltalk/>

jwm

 

[John Carter]

As one Old Fart to an Old Code Toad...

What are you doing with ruby?

Everything they let me.

What would you *like* to do with ruby?

Don't tell anyone, but a vast amount of legacy C/C++ code is just
really crappily written stuff for doing IO/ shifting strings / data
blocks. Supposedly they use C for efficiency. I bet I could port our
embedded app to Ruby and shrink it by about a factor of 20 and still
have it as responsive.

Do you see ruby as a focal-point or general purpose language?
Definitely.

Has anyone worked with ruby along side c++ ?

Stroustrup's stated Objective function in designing C++ was to
extended C to improve code reuse whilst adding the minimum number of
new keywords.

As a Quant you shouldn't take you much thought to see that that is a
wondrously truly crappy objective function for an optimization task!

How about ruby with a big, bad oo-database like Objectivity?

Haven't tried, but just on general principles I do Lots of data
mining. But I don't use databases.

Databases are vastly complicated by the need to handle updates,
insertes, deletes and transactions.

For data mining working with a flat file snapshot can be a 100 times
faster!




John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632
PO Box 1645 Christchurch Email : (e-mail address removed)
New Zealand

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Haven't tried, but just on general principles I do Lots of data
mining. But I don't use databases.

Databases are vastly complicated by the need to handle updates,
insertes, deletes and transactions.

For data mining working with a flat file snapshot can be a 100 times
faster!

I haven't found that to be the case for the kind of data mining I do.
Ruby, Perl, etc. are great for extracting the data into something like
CSV format, but once you've got a CSV, or a bunch of CSVs, it's a lot
faster to copy them into a database (PostgreSQL COPY is your friend --
INSERT is *way* too slow), index them and just throw queries at them.

 

[Dido Sevilla]

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[CodeToad]

Hi Ed,

CodeToad wrote: [...snip...]

What are you doing with ruby?

Pretty much anything I can. At the moment I'm seeing how tightly I can
tweak the interpreter using "standard" Gnu/Linux tricks.

Hope you write that up!

The "big bad project" is something called RAMEAU
(http://cougar.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/Rameau/Rameau.pdf), which is
really more like a Linux distro than a Ruby project, although all of the
infrastructure above the (Gentoo) Linux level is in Ruby. But I have
some smaller things I want to do as well.

[...snip...] because I can hack on existing Lisp code like AthenaCL
and Common Music.

Yea! Another Lisp Guy.

When I do something numeric/statistical, I do it in R, and when I do
scripting/DSL/etc., I do it in Ruby.

Me too. R/S/S+. Also use a lot of monte carlo and predictive/
constrained decision support, so I still pay decisioneering and @risk
in C++. I still really like to stick with oo.

It's general purpose in the sense that it's a good combination of the
best parts of Perl and Java. But it's not general purpose in the same
sense as C or C++ -- yet.

I can't get over my general dislike for Java. Seems like a lot of work
to do anything done.

There are plenty of interfaces to C++ code in Ruby -- most of the major
C++ open source libraries have Ruby bindings, for example.

Found 'em and putting them to work!

There is an excellent Ruby library/binding for both Qt3 and Qt4.


Never heard of it.

Fast, sweet, no more 00-to-relational mapping, just about zero DBA
work
some AI features built in. Eats huge amounts of XML. Likes smalltalk.
I've seen it used to create those huge node-and-branch maps. It seems
that a lot of 3 letter agencies use it quite a bit, which makes sense.
I can see it used well in economertics and regional data (not really
GIS). one of my few clients who pay on time brokers inetlllectual
property, and as far as I know I'm one of the few using american
options and I can easily see using something like that for the IP
work.

 

[znmeb]

Hi Ed,

CodeToad wrote: [...snip...]

What are you doing with ruby?

Pretty much anything I can. At the moment I'm seeing how tightly I can
tweak the interpreter using "standard" Gnu/Linux tricks.

Hope you write that up!

Part of it is going to be on the RubyConf 2007 agenda -- to be
continued, of course.

[...snip...] because I can hack on existing Lisp code like AthenaCL
and Common Music.

Yea! Another Lisp Guy.

If I absolutely positively had to pick one language forever, it would
probably be "a Lisp", although which one I can't say. I'm leaning
towards Scheme.