Leslie Viljoen wrote:
> I just have a hard time accepting that we can't just all program in Ruby
> all the time! I have tried using IRB as a shell! I am eagerly awaiting
> QtRuby
> for Windows! I wish I could somehow load Ruby into my little ARM
> processor
> based embedded devices and kiss C and Assembler goodbye! (ie. in 32k of
> RAM!)
Well ... I had a hard time accepting that I couldn't choose the language
I programmed in if I wanted to get paid for programming ... for about a
week. If I had my druthers, I'd program in Lisp or assembler. It ain't
gonna happen where I work. I program in Perl and R because I know them,
and because I'm on a team with other people who can read my code.

I wrote a very wonderful queuing modeling package a few years back in
Java. Why? Because I wanted something that would run on Windows or UNIX,
which ruled out Visual Basic. That left Perl and Java, and Java was
quite a bit faster, so Java it was.

That code is still sitting in CM untouched! My colleagues are off in a
class learning queuing modeling using something called PDQ, written
first in C and ported to Perl. It looks a *lot* like the package I
wrote. The difference is that it is being *used*, and my code isn't.

Oh yeah ... PDQ has also been ported to Python. Java? Ruby? R? Not
likely unless *I* do it, and since it's open source, what glory or money
would I get out of it? My point is that virtually *no one*, even "lone
wolf" consultants, gets to pick the language on a for-profit project.
It's only in the open-source world where any choice exists. Which is why
Ruby is as good as it is.

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com