Hi John,

On 7/10/06, John Gabriele <jmg3000 / gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Well, we've got rdoc. What specific python doc feature do you miss?
> Maybe being able to type "help( some_obj.some_method )" at the
> interactive prompt?
>
> Personally, I didn't like the Python way of putting doc strings
> *below* the thing they were documenting... always seemed upside-down.
>
>

Coming to Ruby from Python, that was the first thing I said to myself:
"I wish documentation were 'built in' like Python".  Rdoc is great,
and I use it everywhere now, so my documentation desire is met.  But I
had to say that I missed something from Python ;)  No other Python
specific features come to mind that I miss.

I'm blessed right now to be coding Ruby full time for my job. We're
writing tools to test the avionics for the Kepler Space telescope --
this involves generating 110 mega-pixel test images, running them
through the avionics, and then verifying that none of the pixels got
lost or mangled.

The flexibility of Ruby has allowed me to
1) write C code for the parts that need to be fast
2) write Ruby code for the parts that the users want to change all the time
3) use meta-programming to write some DSL syntax so the test engineers
can write their own image generation and validation scripts
4) rake to deploy everything -- I'm amazed no one has mentioned rake yet
5) gems to distribute everything -- another one I'm amazed no one has mentioned

Oh, and the Ruby community is just awesome ... thanks to

Matz - for writing this thing
Guy Decoux - for the mmap library
Jim Weirich - for rake and gems
Ara Howard - for all the awesome answers about threads and numeric
coputing with Ruby
Mauricio - rcov makes our Software Quality Engineers happy
howachen - for this fun thread :)

Blessings,
Tim Pease

PS  We should have an official "Thank Matz" day.  Send him money, or
an Apple iCard, or write a Ruby program that is a haiku and actually
parses and runs -- hmmm ... Ruby Haiku day for Matz