01 Feb 2004 | Mike said...

I was maneuvering my way through some files in the Basecamp preview, and by way of chance, found a lot of files with a .rb extension Ruby.

Now Ruby was the last backend technology I thought you guys would use! Talk about thinking different :)

01 Feb 2004 | JR said...

JF, I'd be interested in a paragraph or two on why you used Ruby. I hadn't heard of it before now.

01 Feb 2004 | Chris from Scottsdale said...

Yeah, I hadn't heard of it either. Looks cool though.

01 Feb 2004 | RS said...

Ruby is a pretty new interpreted language. It's fully object-oriented, meaning that it doesn't just do OO -- every piece of data is an object. Oh and it's super elegant :)

That's the best I can tell you as a non-programmer. Ruby-lang.org has some more detailed info.

02 Feb 2004 | ned said...

uber cool! Ruby is such a nice language that I'd almost volunteer to work for free if I could program in Ruby... but of course, I need to eat.

But seriously, I'm surprised it's taken this long for Ruby to take off in the Web space (it's beginning to). It offers a lot of advantages over PHP and could certainly play in the same space.

02 Feb 2004 | dmr said...

Yes 37crew, why Ruby over the lovely PHP? Tell us about it.

03 Feb 2004 | Chris from Vancouver said...

I couldn't agree with what RS said more. Ruby's a phenomenal language, and I love working with it. I can see PHP being something I might consider (aside from not being overly fond of the syntax), but then again, it seems that everything PHP will have by version 5 is already there in Ruby.

03 Feb 2004 | Tim said...

Not wanting to start the ruby vs python wars all over again but I'd be interested in your perceptions of why you chase Ruby? I presume it's probably your existing skills or possibly 'fear of bracelessness' ? :-)

04 Feb 2004 | Chris from Vancouver said...

Well, Python and Ruby differ in more ways than simply syntax. From a subjective point of view, Ruby feels better - more naturally object-oriented, while I feel like everytime I write "def someMethod(self):" I'm just writing boilerplate code.

After all, the function definition is in the class definition. There's no case in which I'm not going to have self be the first argument, so why require me to type it everytime?

In the end, I suspect it's as much a question of taste as anything else, but it's important to realize that Ruby is not just how malcontents write Python code. ;-)

06 Feb 2004 | paul said...

Python has/had OO bolted on. Ruby is OO to the core. Not to mention more elegant.

Programming tenets, that I think suit ruby well, which i ripped off from someone.

"Anything you do every time you should never have to do."

"Anything you do more than once you should do only once."

08 Feb 2004 | Jeff said...

Like all languages, Ruby has its problems and inconsistencies. That being said, every Perl, PHP, or Python programmer I know that has ever used Ruby has only returned to a scripting-language-beginning-with-P because of their larger number of libraries. And even when they do, they still wish they could be coding in Ruby.

Ruby's syntax is expressive and clear, even in metaprogramming, where many (most?) languages tend to get rather unclear.

25 Feb 2004 | G Systemacher said...

If you've never made it to the level of complex OO designs and seen what can be achieved with collective object reuse using OO discipline, then a language that positively encourages an object oriented approach will not seem that important. The only reason I can think of for using a language that can be OO if you want and simple if you don't (Perl/PHP/Python) is that you already have skills in these and you don't see the benefits of training in a 'we love OO' environment. When you've seen what OO has to offer and then been sucked into a dogshit 'sprawl of includes' project because 'you know php' [or similar] then the penny might drop.

31 May 2004 | Jim said...

I'd be interested in your perceptions of why you chase Ruby? I presume it's probably your existing skills or possibly 'fear of bracelessness' ?