Ruby
Occassionally I hear interesting things about a scripting language called Ruby. The other day I actually starting playing with it. The thing that actually precipitated my venture into the language was a blog post by Scott Hanselmann about using Ruby for unit-testing web apps. I thought "what an interesting idea". So I’ve been playing with it during break times and such for the last few days.
It is still a little early to decide if I’m really going to enjoy the syntax or not. We’ll see. As for IDE’s that run on Windows, I’ve narrowed it down to two that I want to try out longer, Mondrian and FreeRIDE. Both are written in Ruby. We’ll see which one comes out on top.
If any of you out there have played with Ruby, drop me a comment or email and tell me about your experience with it, and why you like it (or not).
Comments
Davide Salomoni 2005-07-07 01:17:00
Eric,
while I have no experience with Ruby, I am wondering if you have considered Python instead. The reason I say this is first of all because I am a Python fan myself; then because of course you can use Python as well for unit-testing web apps (have a look perhaps at http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/02/web-app-testing-with-python-part-1.html); then because I saw from previous posts of yours that you seem to be a .NET addict. With regard to this last point, Microsoft is behind a very interesting effort to port scripting languages to the CLR, and IronPython (cf. http://blogs.msdn.com/hugunin/default.aspx or http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/ironpython) seems to be one of the highlights of this project. I got the impression that for .NET (and to some extent MONO) users, which I am not btw, this could drastically simplifies many things, including perhaps the choice of an IDE (if VisualStudio properly supported IronPython - not sure about the status here).
Hope it helps,
Davide
Eric Sowell 2005-07-07 05:22:00
Yes, that’s a good idea. I’ve heard quite a bit of hype around it as well. I’ll look into it after I’m a little more familiar with Ruby. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it as a possibility for unit testing...
Thanks.
Anonymous 2005-07-07 10:11:00
I’ve used python for simple scripting things on servers.
It took me a great deal longer to grasp than Ruby did...
Ruby made coding SIMPLE for me and Ruby on Rails..I can’t say enough about..just discovered this one last week..and it puts working with PHP to shame!
I’m not a programmer though, merely a network admin who likes to have scripts to automate redundant tasks.
--Huck