brad wrote: > celldee wrote: > > Are there a growing number of non-Rails Ruby jobs that I'm not >> spotting? Or are there really very few organisations that are willing >> to adopt Ruby as a general purpose scripting language? > > Just my observations. I don't encounter it as an official > corporate/institutional language, however, I do see it a lot at the > sys-admin/java developer levels... bottom to top if you will. It's > more of an un-official language used by local developers who are on > average more inquisitive than most. I see Python usage like this too, > however, it seems to be moving more to an 'official' position in > companies. Perl is still strongly entrenched. Many Solaris Admins > won't allow any other interpreted language besides Perl and really > prefer sh scripts as many Perl scripts have rely on non-standard > modules that aren't (and won't be) installed for security reasons. > > Just my 2 cents > At my company, we use Ruby for a lot of general scripting (and this is on Windows) for things like downloading files, pre-processing data, generating statistics and graphs, monitoring link status, sending out emails when things fail, converting data between different data formats, move data between programs, hold different programs together, and oh yes, for Rails. My only complaint with Ruby tends to be that on Windows, it takes a bit of time before the script loads. But that said, the development time with Ruby is fantastic and lets us achieve things very very fast! However, now that you bring it up, at least for our tasks, we find that scripting in Ruby just doesn't require a full-time hand. Yes, when we're doing some Rails work, it takes a few days to get a medium sized app done, but for most general Ruby scripts, the development time is in hours. Admittedly, we do a lot of development in C, C++ and Java for our regular stuff. It is likely that a lot of people are just using it on the side to get things done quickly and then on to something else? Cheers, Mohit. 8/21/2007 | 11:27 PM.