Small announcement: Ruby R0XXORS.

[elfs]

Ruby is officially cool. Even without Rails, I can totally see how this language could become addictive fast. I barely speak the language and am desperately thumbing through the nutshell book at warp speed and I manage to write a better, faster, and more secure version of Narrator, this one obeying the principle of "configuration, not integration!", in less than half an hour.

That's totally cool. The only question remaining is simple: does the lack of an interim on-disk format cause a performance hit compared to the python version?

Comments

[leethomps.livejournal.com]

Uh oh, a geek with a new programming language!

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

I like Ruby. I _Really_ like Ruby on Rails. I really, really, _really_ wish it had as much online docmentation as perl (when you're reduced to catching one of the developers in the IRC channel to ask for help, that's not good), but I like it.

One co-developer and I have managed to write a nearly complete replacement for Pele's Playground with nifty added features -- in three weeks, with me having a broken shoulder.

Very nice. (And, I think, a tool that will be useful for others -- for unreleased stories/chapters, people with beta-reader permissions can comment inline, ala annocpan, and I'm greatly looking forward to getting it working.) I just wish there was a RubyMonks or a RailsMonks.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

"does the lack of an interim on-disk format cause a performance hit compared to the python version?"

Is this really important? Is that app pushing the systems you're running it on? I often find myself optimizing things too early or which just don't need optimizing at all, so I'm wondering whether you're doing the same thing.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

This app? Not yet.

However, at work we had a large python program for statistics gathering. One of the requirements was that any one statistic should run in 0.20 seconds or less. The fastest ran in 1.10. After one of co-workers tweaked and twisted, he managed to get it down to 0.89. I said to him, "It's a big python script. Try breaking all of the different operations out into modules, pre-compiling them, and loading them on demand."

He didn't think that would make any difference, but rendering the python process tree turned out to be the bulk of the development time: it knocked the runtime down to 0.11 seconds.

So, yeah, sometimes that is really important.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. Having the bytecode precompiled definitely makes a difference. I was just questioning whether this app needs to be optimized anyways.

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

I would totally take a job doing Ruby development for a sub-poverty level wage, just to get to do something with it. It's such a sexy little toy.