The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'ruby'
2004/7/8
Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, a gleefully insane and yet surprisingly useful beginner's guide to the Ruby language, peppered with zany examples and illustrated with cartoons, and sidebars rambling about gigantic robot monkey brains and such. A bit like those children's guides to TRS-80 BASIC programming and such that were around in the 1980s, only on much stronger drugs.
Ruby's a fairly nifty language; though probably a bit too overshadowed by both Perl and Python, which are technically more ordinary-looking but good enough for most things and have inertia behind them, to become big. Still, I should probably get around to doing more with it at some stage.
2003/1/15
The Year in Scripting Languages, a roundup of what happened in 2002 in the worlds of Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl and Lua.
(Lua? Oh yes, it appears to be a new embedded scripting language of Brazilian origin. No idea what it looks like, as the site doesn't actually show any code.)
"Forget about Basic and go for Lua! Lua is just as easy to use, but a lot more powerful. Lua is also very easy to extend."
-- Jon Kleiser, in comp.sys.mac.programmer.help.
2000/8/16
There's an interesting discussion on Slashdot about how human languages influence programming languages, and how languages designed by non-English-speakers would differ from ones designed by English-speakers. (Oddly enough, some of the most elegant recent programming languages come from non-English-speaking countries; Ruby and Python, for example, are of Japanese and Dutch origin, respectively, while Perl is very American. What does this say about the clarity of the English language?)