What do you think about Ruby ?
Blake
blake at kingdomrpg.com
Sun Aug 7 12:51:08 UTC 2005
On Sun, 07 Aug 2005 04:50:35 -0700, Damien Cassou <cassou at iam.unibe.ch>
wrote:
> You all answer the same way, you are all poet. But nobody answer the
> question :
>
> What are the "technical" differences ?
It's a broad question. I answered part of it, which is that Ruby uses
traditional language constructs to avoid the conceptual difficulty some
people have in adapting to a straight "object message" syntax. In other
words, the "foreign" construct of:
1 to: 4 do: [:i | Transcript show:i].
in Smalltalk is replcaed by:
i = 0
begin
puts "#{i}"
i += 1
end until i > 4
Perl is Ruby's other big influence.
Other people pointed out that Ruby is file-based versus Smalltalk's image
based. That it is "just" a language and libraries, while Smalltalk is an
environment (according to Alan Kay, for building something better than
Smalltalk).
What else do you want? Ruby is slower--it's VM is far less mature. It has
multiple IDEs (good) but none of them are of Squeak's sophistication
(bad). I don't think it has anything like Etoys, morphic, or Croquet,
though it may play better with external libraries.
It has Ruby-on-Rails which is similar to Seaside though I think the
consensus here is that Seaside is far more powerful. As far as I can tell,
there's no running the actual VM inside a browser, as you can with Squeak.
And this is just Ruby-in-general versus Squeak-in-particular. VisualWorks
doesn't have Etoys for example but it does have the sort of optimized VM
Ruby users just pine for.
As I said, it's a broad question. If you're not happy with the answers,
narrow it down.
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