On Mon, Sep 19, 2005, at 06:39 PDT, Brian Chrisman wrote:
> Sam Phillips wrote:
>
> >I've bitten the bullet and been messing around with Ruby on Rails for
> >work recently and have been very pleased.
> >
> >So has anyone been playing with Ruby on Rails? What do people think?
> >
> >http://www.rubyonrails.com
> >
> I'd be interested in hearing a more informed opinion... but basically it
> appears to be automatic object wrappers for your database objects in Ruby...
> I couldn't really find a compelling reason to learn more about ruby
> though... I applied CJ Djikstra's adage (paraphrased) 'If a programming
> language doesn't change the way you think about programming, it wasn't
> worth learning.' I haven't heard a lot of 'oh wow' comments from ruby
> newbies.. more like 'neat language' comments. It would need some
> compelling comparisons to existing imperative, object oriented languages
> like perl, php and python to make it worth while.
There are actually three major bits to Rails, Active Record (which does
the object model<->database mapping), Active Controller (performs
controller portion of MVC), and Active View (which does output
templating.) In addition to this, and where it shines for me, is that
it makes you do things to a standard which keeps your code relatively
clean. Also it comes with development tools a ruby web server for
development, an interpreter with your environment preloaded, a tracer
that interacts with the web server, a profiler, and a testing skeleton.
It can also make code stubs for starting out, and then you just fill in
the blanks. Also almost none of the RoR code I've written so far needs
to include/import the other modules that it uses, it just does it by
itself.
Ruby as a language is interesting because it takes a lot of python bits
and adds a lot of Lispish bits. An example:
# given a list add 3 to each element
[1,2,3,4,5,6].collect do |x|
x + 3
end
=> [4,5,6,7,8,9]
Also it has continuations.
You can rewire modules and classes in modules that use them. So if you
have a class called Time and wanted to change it's behavior (add
instance variable or methods, etc.) within a specific module you can do
so without making a subclass of Time.
> Right now, I write xslt code to generate stuff that I think has similar
> features to RoR, but kind of language independent... so I'm definitely
> interested in hearing what kind of features you like out of RoR... might
> give me some extra ideas...
Wow. One of the problems I had with doing xslt is that, at the time, it
seemed to do anything useful you were married to some languages xslt
implementation.
Probably the best thing out of RoR is that it is a MVC framework and
anything that you try to do outside of this model is hard, making it
easier for you if you just stick with MVC. It comes with base libraries
for database, sessions, templating, and more to prevent wheel
reinvention.
> These days, I'm trying to learn more about functional program design
> using haskell etc... so like... if there are any people with functional
> programming experience willing to discuss it, I'll buy beer.
If I was in Reno I would have you buy me a beer. I've just come off of
a 6 month Haskell kick. And before that 2-3 years of scheme. There are
monads and functions all over my desk. The one thing I miss about
working in Prolog and Haskell is declarative programming.
> There's another language I've been looking at lately called o:xml
> (www.o-xml.org) which is an XML-syntax imperative OO language, which
> gets transformed into either java or C++ at your liesure.. (I'm
> betting support for other languages wouldn't be too difficult to
> achieve.) From what I can tell, all of its variables/entities suppot
> an xpath querying interface... could be very useful for dealing with
> deep data structures.. :-)
I have deep suspicions of XML syntax based languages. I'm afraid that
my <, >, and / keys will wear out.
--
Sam Phillips <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.dasbistro.com/~sam/
San Francisco California
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