centrepins
2/16/2005 9:41:00 PM
A few musings/questions/dribble from an excited newbie. And my first
"big" (well, alright, long-winded) post to this forum.
I'm at an interesting crossroads of my programming career because up
'til now I've really concentrated on thick-client, Windows-based
front-end programs mainly written in VB, and usually Oracle and PL/SQL
back-end.
Soon I'm going to have to learn java/web-development. A lot of what I
work on is heading out to a wider audience and so web development
beckons. Web interfaces/programs/reports etc. on top of databases
I've created already and no doubt new ones in the future. It seems to
me that nowadays the web interface is now rich enough to create good
interfaces (without the need to resort to ActiveX - urgh!). In the
past I always thought the web development was lacking a great deal of
power compared to what I could provide in the thick-client
environment.
Looks like my initial tool will need to be Java. Not so much by
choice (it's an OK sort of language but not something I can really
love), the existing website that I'll be adding to uses Java Servlets
and I'll be interfacing to a SQL*Server database for a change.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say are, in my programming world, things
are changing.
Which got me thinking about Ruby, which is currently standing on a
pedestal beside me, with the label "Glenn's absolute favourite
language of all time ever". The pedestal, while wobbly, is being held
firm by a printed copy of Why?'s Poignant Guide and PickAxe2.
Ruby is clearly a beautiful language, easy to learn, clear to read, OO
in a nice way (ie. not in the Java way!), and with the right people
behind it with the right mindset to keep it that way and progress the
language to the future.
It would be nice if a big company would get behind Ruby and give it
the kind of marketing oomph that Java has had. Amazing how such a
clearly flawed "modern" language like Java can get such widespread
acceptance when a nice language like Ruby has to almost fight to be
noticed! Python seems to have caught on in the opensource community,
yet I've read more than a few python people say they prefer Ruby from
what they've seen.
Do we think Ruby will ever "get there" like Python, Perl, even Java?
I saw mention of some new things being added to the Ruby language.
AOP (which I had to look up - aspect oriented programming) looks to be
useful, and a big selling point of Eiffel is design-by-contract,
something else I've seen suggested as a possible ruby-enhancement.
What's the situation with these and others? Where can I read about
current ruby-developments going on? I keep seeing reference to Ruby
1.9, but the Windows Installer is only at 1.8-14. Is Ruby 1.9 just
"in development at this stage" and what's scheduled to be in it?
Now a controversial point. The perl website (www.perl.com) catches my
eye. So does the Python one (www.python.org). For whatever reason,
both websites made me go "mmm, this language looks interesting, lets
investigate further.
The Ruby one (www.ruby-lang.org) doesn't. Well, not for me. It's not
a bad website, most of the basic content is there, but so much more
could be added to it, to sort of collect lots of basic ruby info and
websites into one specific place, to attract and interest the new
potential rubyist. And it should be much more eyecatching. Like the
website should be an HTML venus-flytrap for programmers. Well, that's
my thought anyway.
I did say it was a controversial point!
Another point. I keep seeing mention of "Ruby 2" and "Rite" in the
same sentence. That Rite is perhaps the new name for Ruby 2? If
there is a plan to rename Ruby 2 as Rite, (and I'm new remember so I
might have got my wires crossed) then I think this is a very bad idea.
Market Ruby so far, then rename it something else? Nah. Silly idea.
In My Opinion. Stick to Ruby2.
Other than that, marvellous. All of it. A+ Gold Star to all
involved.
And I have NOT been drinking.