thoughts.on.code

I have been playing with Ruby off and on for a while now (since the Des Moines No Fluff Just Stuff conference) and am finally starting to become productive with it. My copy of pickaxe came in early last week, so things have really picked up. On Friday I wrote my first “real” script (i.e. actually does something useful for me, not just a tutorial).

It’s a very easy language, from the standpoint that I do not really know the syntax, yet it seems to write naturally. It is much easy to get started on a problem, where as in Java it always starts with:

class DoSomethingOrOther
public static void main(String[] args) {
  System.out.println(”Hello, please help me”);
 }
}

And in Ruby its:

Of course, that is overly simplistic… or is it? Writing a simple web app with a database using rails is so trivial I still have a hard time believing it can be that easy. Take a look at this, this and this.

Another scripting language I really like is Jython, which has the really handy ability to use (and simplify!) the Java standard APIs, which I have been using daily for the last 5 years. I like the expressiveness of Jython, which is really just Python on the Java VM and in my limited experience, similiar to Ruby. But it suffers from being considered an “add-on” to Java, and having to compete for a community with the other VM-based scripting languages. I will not be investing anymore time in Jython, unless I have a specific need for it. And at that point, I would probably look at Groovy, if I need Java libraries. Otherwise, its Ruby for me.