[clue-cert] awk book

[Dennis J Perkins]

On Sat, 2005-08-13 at 10:06 -0600, Sean LeBlanc wrote:

> Lots of buzz about Ruby over in Java-land due to the Ruby-on-Rails project.
> At least one project popped up to emulate it (Trails - get it? Rails to
> Trails? ). 

I see that Oreilly has just released a book about Ruby On Rails.  

> Also I think Paul Graham said it was one language that's getting
> to close to catching up with his favorite language, Lisp, and even though
> Hani biled the guy
> (http://www.jroller.com/page/fate/?anchor=is_paul_graham_stupider_than), I
> find Graham to say things that tend to be thoughtful and intelligent, even
> if I don't always agree. Besides, I think Hani's biles tend to be about 80%
> tongue in cheek. 

This link points to something called Biledoc.  The name is apt, because
that is all the writer has... a bilious rant.  I don't know if I have
read anything by Graham, but the writer has only convinced me that I do
not want to waste time reading his rants, not that Graham is an idiot.

> Anyhow, thought you might like this. It's Ten Things a Java Programmer
> Should Know About Ruby. Even if you aren't all that familiar with Java, it
> may be interesting to you...
> http://onestepback.org/articles/10things/
> 

Interesting presentation for a Java coder.

> The only problem with new languages is that even if it was 10x the
> productivity for the average developer, most PHB's would put the brakes on
> using it since it's not .NET and it's not Java/J2EE. I say "new" even though
> I know Ruby's been around for a few years - but I bet you that about 0.0001%
> of managers have heard of Ruby. 

When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  That's
how PHBes view things.

How many languages have ever given 10x productivity, except for the jump
from assembly to Fortran, Cobol, etc.?

When Matz created Ruby, he borrowed features from other languages, as
any language developer would do.  He borrowed from Smalltalk, Lisp,
Java, Python,  and Perl.  The language he created is not perfect, but it
is clean.  I think it is an incremental improvement, not a big jump.
Look at how accessors are done in Ruby, as opposed to C++ or Java.  An
incremental improvement to reduce a bit of programming tedium.  Ruby's
use of block/iterator is another one I like.

I like scripting languages.  Not because I could write a program more
quickly (in some cases I didn't save any time because debugging took up
most of the time anyway.)  but because I was programming in an
environment where I did not have a budget for buying any software, and
because it was easier to hand the program over for minor maintenance to
occasional programmers with no programming training.  Portability was
sometimes a factor, too, because I did not need to recompile on a
different platform.  So I have used Rexx on OS/2, and awk, Tcl/Tk and
Python on SCO Unix, and Python and Ruby on Windows.

Some things require more speed.  Or you need to prevent the customer
from seeing and modifying the code.  In my case, I need to use C to
write driver programs for coprocessor modules in PLC systems.  Sorry, C
++ won't fit.  And Visual Basic doesn't exist outside Windows.




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