What's wrong with Ruby? (was Re: SQL Benchmark, what environment?)

["Fred @ Planetary Server" <user=1474@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:13:59 -0500, <[hidden email]> wrote: 
... 
>> Ruby? :-) 
> 
> Ruby, seriously? Hasn't its 15 minutes of fame expired yet? 
... 
>> The choices may be limited even more by the availability of latest   
>> drivers 
>> for all of the various target databases. This might -- painfully -- rule 
>> out Ruby since I have not been able to find a 10g or 11g client for it. 
> 
> Sorry, I can't take Ruby all that seriously. 

I know quite a few languages. C++, C, Python, Java, Forth, PHP, Perl, Lisp   
(well, a little! :-)), and Ruby. 

Ruby emcompases the best features and power of all of the languages I   
mentioned above with the possible exception of Forth and PHP. It is the   
most Object-Oriented language I've ever seriously worked with. The sheer   
power of Ruby is absolutely astounding. I was actually surprised myself,   
as I uttered many "whoas" the day it took me to learn Ruby. I was able to   
learn it so quickly because it felt like I knew it already! 

Ruby's current drawback is that may not be up to heavy-duty service for   
high-volume websites because it's a little slow. But then all new   
languages were "slow" at their inception and got faster as they matured. I   
see Ruby as no exception. Ruby also lacks support for native threading,   
having its own internal threading implementation. But it also has support   
for multiple processes if you need to take advantage of multicore cpus,   
and many would favor that approach over threading anyway. 

Ruby allows you to modify the functionality of *any* object, including the   
standard ones, incuding the so-called "primitives" like strings and   
integers, which can be a very powerful thing in the right hands. Ruby also   
has great support for doing lambda-style programming -- indeed, this   
approach is strongly encouarged by the language constructs. Ruby has   
excellent support for doing meta-programming, and for detecting when a   
class has been sub-classed, allowing you to do some "magic" there as well. 

Alas, the newness means currently support for some things is lacking, but   
popularity is growing rapidly, so this will be less and less of an issue   
over time. 

So, I'd be interested in knowing what it is about Ruby that leads you to   
not take it seriously. In many of the cases where you might choose to use   
Python or PHP or Perl, Ruby would also make an excellent choice, if not   
better. 

>> C++ may be overkill for this too, since you'd have to go through the 
>> entire modify-compile-link cycle everytime you made a change. 
> 
> You pretty much have to do that with Java as well unless you use pure   
> jsp. 

True as well, but at least Java does give you more portability than   
C++ does. And Java has excellent support for threads that C++ does not   
offer out of the box, but that may not be so important for benchmarking. 

-Fred 

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