On Sat, 21 Feb 2004, Larry Felton Johnson wrote:

> This is just a note introducing myself to the list, and
> explaining what I hope to get from the list.

howdy

> I'm a software systems engineer at Georgia State University.
> That basically translates to Unix Systems Administrator, though
> my specialty is programming systems utilities.  We run Solaris.
> 
> Most of my scripts are written in perl, I have one pretty large
> scale project I wrote and maintain in php, and for the forseeable
> future I'll probably still be primarily working in perl (most of
> the people in our group know at least a little perl, so if I'm
> not available the code is not inaccessable to my workgroup).
> 
> About a year ago I began looking at ruby, really liked it.  It seemed
> clean, easy to read, and had all the usual capabilities which attracted
> me to perl to begin with.  I didn't pursue it at the time because perl 
> was adequate for my needs.  About two weeks ago I started dabbling in ruby
> again, and have decided to write those utilities not likely to be 
> maintained by anyone else (in other words scripts for my own use)
> in ruby so I'll get a more rounded experience in the language.

this is how i started.  after three days i gave up perl altogether.  after a
week i gave up c++ altogether.  after a month or two i gave up c except to
write ruby extensions.  after a few more months i gave up idl for image
processing and use classes i wrote using mmap that are simpler and faster.

> 
> The typical script I'll be writing is the usual administrators utility
> where one opens a file (including program output in that category) loops
> through the file a line at a time doing regex matches, and does appropriate
> stuff based on those matches.
> 
> I look forward to browsing this list and asking questions from time to
> time.  ruby strikes me as a very good scripting language.

don't limit yourself to scripting tasks!  i'm currenlty designing an entire
near-realtime satelite image processing system in ruby!

> 
> Larry 

hope you'll find the group useful - it's full of really bright and helpful
people

-a
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