"Florian Frank" <flori / nixe.ping.de> wrote in message
news:20021217182017.GE12663 / nixe.eavesdrop.ping.de...

> There are four important points why Ruby rules without beeing the
> fastest language in existance:
>
> 1. Development time shrinks and programmer's time is more expensive than
>    hardware.

DON'T use that argument - software is never fast enough. The correct
argument is that Ruby may not be the fastest, but it is within reason fast
enough. It has very efficient build-in datastructures such as hashes and it
makes it more viable to experiment and find the faster algorithm. Algorithm
improve in orders of magnitude where Ruby is rarely more than a factor 3
slower than C++ except for tight loop computations.

> 2. Program LOCs shrink => Less lines = Less possible errors.

This is very true.

> 3. If you really need the speed you can easily use Ruby's C-API.
>    (Compare Perl XS to get the difference.)

This is not really a good argument - it's often a hassle to configure,
build, test and deploy extra dll's and the additional deployment issues that
follows. (In OCaml you can link in C source which makes all the difference).
However, it certainly is possible once you set up good procedures for doing
so, it just doesn't come for free.

> 4. It's more fun to program in Ruby than to search errors in bad
>    strongly typed languages. => Better code quality.

It is fun to program in Ruby - but I wouldn't say more fun than strongly
typed languages in general, but certainly more fun than C++ and Java. Well
Ruby is more fun because it's Ruby ...


Mikkel