On Feb 20, 2007, at 9:54 AM, Daniel Stenning wrote: > While waiting for my RB process to compile and "do its thing" I > thought I'd > start reading up on Ruby on the web, which brought up this question : > > Is Ruby quicker and easier to program in than RB ? > > Anyone out there used enough to be able to give an answer ? > Where would RB beat out Ruby ( I'm guessing its the lack of a X > platform GUI > framework ) and where would Ruby really be the best solution ? > ( Rails > apps for the web ? )
Ruby is a very powerful and expressive language, capable of types of abstraction you just can't do in REALbasic (first class functions, continuations, closures, modifying classes at runtime, metaclasses, ...). If you're comfortable with programming using those abstractions, you can write programs that are more concise and flexible than you can using REALbasic. Ruby on Rails, a little project you may have heard of, uses these features to make a very slick, rapid to develop with, but flexible web site and database programming environment. If you've looked at Rails, you'll notice how much it does for you -- not talking about code generation, but things like associating classes with tables by name, or picking up relations between tables with a single declaration. Rails can do those kinds of things by cleverly exploiting the rich abstractions afforded by the language. REALbasic has one great strength: it's really the only high-level means available to write cross-platform GUI applications from one code base. The language is okay, not bad. The framework is pretty good. Both are getting better. But if you were programming just for one platform, there are languages and frameworks available that beat out REALbasic soundly. There are ways of doing GUI programming with Ruby, but they're not great. So: REALbasic for cross-platform GUI applications. Ruby for web sites and non-GUI applications in general. I'll mention in passing here that I'd *love* to get a Ruby plugin for REALbasic. Regards, Guyren G Howe Relevant Logic LLC guyren-at-relevantlogic.com ~ http://relevantlogic.com REALbasic, PHP, Ruby/Rails, Python programming PostgreSQL, MySQL database design and consulting Technical writing and training _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
