Hi

> i'm working on a book about scientific programming with ruby... although 
> this
> project looks to be a bit much to do a case study on it is quite 
> interesting.

Really interesting to hear about this book. Looking at the list of 
projects, and also from following c.l.r. it seems that almost all 
current work relates to natural sciences and engineering, and little for 
  humanities and social sciences. This is probably mostly to do with 1) 
there being more problems in natural science disciplines that are 
tractable to computational intensification and 2) there being more 
people working in those sciences that have skills or training in 
programming.

However, Perl has historically been used quite widely for research in 
some humanities and soc sci, and Ruby has all the advantages that have 
made Perl popular in, for example, textual and linguistic analysis. It 
will be interesting to see whether Ruby's use in these fields will 
increase as it matures and is better known. A couple of recent modules 
supplying stemming algorithms might be a good example.

A couple of (mostly commercial) applications that do similar things to 
Weft provide scripting languages. I'm planning to use Ruby to allow Weft 
QDA users to do the same. Actually, this feature exists but is disabled 
in release versions for the same reasons that I wouldn't hand users a 
slightly unpredictable chainsaw with no instructions. But once it has a 
properly documented API and a helpful GUI, it will be interesting to see 
how much the type of people who use this software (non-programmers, but 
often with experience in simple scripting languages in e.g. stat 
packages) find Ruby as a scripting tool. My hunch is that they will like it!

regards
alex