Question about development languages

[T. E. Pickering]

out of curiosity, how many people out there are using ruby at all?  i
was a perl hacker for many years and tried to switch to python, but
even after a couple months python seemed like a slog compared what i
was used to.  then one day i picked up a ruby book on a lark and
immediately saw the Light.  its syntax, especially for regexps, is
similar enough to perl to be friendly to old perl mongers, but its
support for OO (in fact it's purely OO) and threading is a lot cleaner
and easier to use than python's.  i still go back to perl, though,
when i need to munge data because the PDL module provides plotting and
numerical support that's superior to anything yet available for the
other scripting languages.

we've been using ruby pretty heavily at our observatory for various
network tasks and for building guis using the gtk2 bindings at
http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/.  we find it a lot easier to use
ruby threading to build dynamic GUIs than perl/python plus gtk's
idle/timeout add mechanism.  they seem to have done a good job melding
ruby's threading with gtk's so it's been quite stable for us when
handled carefully.  it results in more responsive guis, too.  i've
been building rpms for ruby-gnome2 for our own use and can clean them
up for contribution to fedora if there's demand..

tim

-- 
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  T. E. Pickering, Ph.D.            |              MMT Observatory  |
|  Assoc. Staff Scientist            |           933 N. Cherry Ave.  |
|  tim at mmto.org                      |           Tucson, AZ   85721  |
|  tpickering at tmomail.com (SMS)      |               (520) 626-3755  |
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Uncle Ed's Rule of Thumb:
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	You'll either hit it with a hammer or get a splinter in it.