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[kurdt]

I'm reading The Ruby Programming Language book. I'm only 100 pages in and I have no previous experience with Ruby so I'm no expert yet. And to be clear, I'm talking about Ruby, not Ruby on Rails.

But it seems that's there's some truth to Ruby's "Programmer's best friend" slogan. It seems Matz (the guy who's behind Ruby) has truly created something awesome. Ruby is faster than PHP and it does a lot more. After 100 pages it seems that if desktop computer is C, laptop is .NET and iphone is PHP, Ruby is ipad. It's similar mix of niceties of scripting language and powerfulness of more low level languages like C.

I'm still learning but it seems pretty awesome language... will report when I have actual coding experience

[isthisthingon]

Ruby is beautiful, and far less dangerous in the hands of the experienced.  However, like other scripting languages, Ruby has areas where performance problems preclude previously preferred programming practices, otherwise known as the 7Ps.  Anyone who knows anything about programming knows about the seven Ps, FFS.

One area of concern is threading.  Threads in Ruby are dreadfully expensive and should be called ropes.  They're still great to have, but they're not ideal in terms of larger scaling architectures.  But as I've mentioned in the past, employing a non-blocking, evented approach to highly scalable architectures (nested callback or Reactor pattern approach) offsets this thread performance loss.

PS: I was kidding about the 7Ps, however I laughed when I googled it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Ps_%28military_adage%29

[kurdt]

Ruby is beautiful, and far less dangerous in the hands of the experienced.  However, like other scripting languages, Ruby has areas where performance problems preclude previously preferred programming practices, otherwise known as the 7Ps.  Anyone who knows anything about programming knows about the seven Ps, FFS.

One area of concern is threading.  Threads in Ruby are dreadfully expensive and should be called ropes.  They're still great to have, but they're not ideal in terms of larger scaling architectures.  But as I've mentioned in the past, employing a non-blocking, evented approach to highly scalable architectures (nested callback or Reactor pattern approach) offsets this thread performance loss.

Actually the reason why I chose to learn Ruby is that I know I don't have enough passion to learn C or similar low level language so good that I can say I'm solid with it. But with Ruby I can get more milage out of scripting language similar to PHP and get support for REST architecture out of the box. Coding takes a bit different type of mind than what I have. My mind seems to be able to connect unseemingly similar patterns to each other in order to create new things but I can't hold a lot of parallel information in my mind at once which seems to be the key for brilliant programmer.

Luckily I have designed a new type of architecture that makes it possible to start coding the system with any language and replace any piece of it later with faster code written with another language without even rebooting the system.

P.S. We are actually talking about using Node as server for few things. There's also EventMachine for Ruby in case you haven't ran into it before but right now I'm liking Node.js better. What we are planning to pull off isn't anything you have probably seen before, at least in the web, so it's a bit hard to explain without going into details It's bits and pieces from everywhere put together in a way that's going to be beyond awesome ... whole iPad thing is going to look lame in comparison what I'm planning to do to the web

[nop_90]

This make programs in C/C++ is total BS.
Take a look at autocad, probably one of the most successful programs. In that case they took the embedding route. Main program is made in C/C++ embedded in side it is lisp interpreter. Blizzard and most other successful gamings companies embed lua. Firefox same story with javascript.
Or you can go the extending route this is the strategy used with python and ruby proggies. Make basic program with script, embed C/C++.

Ruby is very beautiful. It has many features which only lisp has.
Really nice thing is blocks and closures. Also besides scheme it has callcc. Callcc is super cool.

That all said, why do i use python . Mainly because i am used to python, massive ammount of 3rd party libs for python. Ease at which python can interface with C/C+ libs.
Also ruby lacks a VM (they are working on one), if they ever get a proper VM i will switch over

One area of concern is threading.  Threads in Ruby are dreadfully expensive and should be called ropes.  They're still great to have, but they're not ideal in terms of larger scaling architectures.  But as I've mentioned in the past, employing a non-blocking, evented approach to highly scalable architectures (nested callback or Reactor pattern approach) offsets this thread performance loss.

Biggest issue is threads. Ruby threads are not "real threads" but what are called "green threads". Not having real threads only becomes an issue when doing stuff like GUI.
As a rule of thumb, no need to use threads. Reactor pattern is much better. In python the library of choice is twisted.

[isthisthingon]

>EventMachine

Yep.

>This make programs in C/C++ is total BS.

I've been hearing this basically my whole life.  Then something like MongoDB comes out - written entirely in C++ - and again the crowd says 

Though C/C++ would be terribly slow to build everything in, they never seem to become extinct.  Following any conceivable path leading to where only the highest level languages are needed/worth the ROI, all you need to do is reduce the size of your hardware.  Firmware will favor C-like languages for generations to come, imho.  As soon as the device becomes capable of interpreting a HLL, someone comes out with something smaller or someone wants more from the same device to happen faster 

[nop_90]

As soon as the device becomes capable of interpreting a HLL, someone comes out with something smaller or someone wants more from the same device to happen faster 

They already had that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine 

[isthisthingon]

Wicked tight form factor



Hook a strap to it and you've got a fashionable wristwatch

[vsloathe]

I love Ruby to death.

But I rarely write in it as I'm much more familiar with PHP and Perl. I strongly prefer Ruby to Python as I think Python's whitespace obsession is silly.

Agreed on the threads ITTO. I came here to post the same thing. They're not truly threads in that they live in the same resource space as the application does, and they are very expensive because they don't "detach", they "clone".

[isthisthingon]

The whitespace obsession is a concession.  But Google, Canonical/Ubuntu and even NASA went with Python!!