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May 21, 2005
Oooh....Shiny Objects!
Geeks are a bit like a moth to an insect zapper. A new shiny object comes along, they drop what they are doing and suddenly the new shiny object is the greatest thing on earth and nothing else matters. Often this allure to the shiny object can happen on mass. Like zombies in a terrible b-grade movie the giant horde moves mindlessly towards the new shiny object. Hopefully it is not as deadly as the 'insect zapper' is for the moth. Unfortunately it often is.
For me, the latest shiny object is Ruby. Okay...I know Ruby itself is not very new but there has certainly been a lot of talk and discussion going on in the IT community recently about it and Ruby on Rails. It has been enough to spark my interest in joining the mindless hordes of Zombies who are held in its spell.
So what do I like about Ruby? Do I like its portability? What about it's support for closures? I certainly do find it more expressive than many languages. Perhaps I like it just because it is something new for me to explore. Perhaps I just like being with the other Zombies.
There is certainly nothing unique about Ruby. Every feature I have come across has featured previously in other languages at some time such as Eiffel, Perl, and Small Talk etc.
I think the reason I like Ruby so much is that it is the first time I have come across such an expressive language with so many features (none that are original) that do not get in the way of the language. I find my self writing code the way I like to express my ideas.
So would I consider using Ruby for the next big application? Not a chance.
There is one aspect I really dislike about Ruby. "Wash out your mouth Andy...how dare you!" ... sorry, but it is true. My gripe is that there is simply no IDE for ruby that I would consider worthy. This point alone is enough for me not to use ruby for any large code base.
But damn it....I do enjoy programming in Ruby so much. I guess at the very least any future scripts that I might other wise have written in Perl will probably be written in Ruby.
What is that! Is that another shiny object just peeking over the horizon? ...
Posted by Andy at May 21, 2005 05:54 PM
Comments
I love Ruby as well. The one thing I find really annoying is the "noise" with all the "end"s. As much as people have always derided the curly brace in C-like languages, they are skinny enough that they're easy to ignore. having ends everywhere - I find - becomes somewhat noisy.
Having said that, it is a very cool language with some features I've always wanted and others I never realised I would want until now :)
Posted by: Simon Harris at May 21, 2005 10:27 PM
I agree with the IDE problems. It's holding me back as well. Best bet right now is to get a Mac Mini and use Textmate. This guy is also working on a hyped IDE for rubyrails:
http://www.onemanswalk.com/wiki/blog
Posted by: Tristan at May 22, 2005 06:54 AM
The Eclipse plugin is actually really good. It does syntax highlighting, indenting, code reformatting, a nice GUI test/unit-runner. It's actually almost better than TextMate on Mac (which I personally use).
Posted by: Jon Tirsen at May 24, 2005 12:00 PM
Thanks Jon. I shall have a look at the Eclipse plugin to see what it offers. It has to be better than what I have seen so far...doesn't it?
An update on the IDE that Tristan mentions above... I have tried down loading it from http://www.onemanswalk.com/wiki/blog but get a lovely File not found error message. I hope to track down a copy though so I can have a look...Mmmm...I can sense a Ruby IDE Review coming up on sloshydog.
Posted by: Andy at May 25, 2005 12:49 AM