Earlier this month, NewsFactor compared Perl and PHP as candidates for use in IT projects. To round out our coverage of scripting languages, we wanted to take a look at a promising up-and-comer called Ruby.
You may or may not have heard of Ruby -- it is only now gathering steam outside of Japan -- but you would do well to familiarize yourself with it, since it is rapidly gaining popularity among open source programmers and in enterprise settings.
What Is Ruby?
Like Perl and Python, Ruby is an interpreted language. It is object-oriented, and its syntax is comparable to that of languages like Eiffel and ADA. Ruby is also a cross-platform language, with interpreters that run on Windows, Linux, various flavors of Unix, Mac OS and even DOS.
One might think that because Ruby is only now garnering a following among English-speaking programmers, it is fairly new. But Ruby actually has been around for 10 years. The problem for a long time was that it lacked English documentation, and thus any kind of widespread awareness in many areas of the world, according to Dave Thomas, co-author with Andrew Hunt of Programming Ruby. He told NewsFactor that he wrote the book because he "had to keep explaining what Ruby was" to prospective clients.
"Until recently, information about Ruby was not really available outside of Japan,"
chromatic, technical editor of the O'Reilly Network, confirmed. "It's been whispered
about in secret for the past few years. Some of the really smart kids have been playing
with it for three or four years."
Chromatic told NewsFactor that there is still a shortage of English-language documentation
for Ruby. "Dave and Andy's book is a good introduction ... but there's not much else."
For his part, Thomas said that documentation has improved, though there are still some
limitations. "There are still libraries documented in Japanese that are not documented in
English ... but most of the time you can take them and work out what they do anyway."
Where Ruby Shines
Although Ruby documentation is still in progress, the language offers many benefits
that might be reason enough for IT managers to consider using it. Chromatic said that
as the new kid on the block, relatively speaking, Ruby has been able to learn from other
languages. "It's had the chance to borrow the good features and polish some of the yuckier features. In particular, it's a lot nicer to embed Ruby than it is Perl." (continued...)
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