It is an interpretive language that recently gained a lot of attention. http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
Whoa, you can try it right on the web brower without installing anything. http://tryruby.hobix.com/
It is interpreted. Somewhat like BASIC on the Commodore 64. Does it remind you of functional languages such as the Read-Eval-Print nature of LISP or Scheme?
Yes, it does have all that lambda things that functional language purists love.
I LIKE the pretty tutorials in the site. Besides more "syntax sugar" in Ruby as CS purists call it, I don't see how it revolutionize software development... Ok, it can do OOP (which LISP doesn't).
Strange, bloated syntax: LOTS of punctionations used &, @, also @@, %, :, even the absolute value pair ||,... The condition for if-statements can come behind!
Too complex for my taste. See here for details.
But is there anything truly revolutionary about OO from C++ or Java besides the bloated syntax?
Some people are obsessed with OOP. where the second O stands for obsession: Object Obsessed Programming, like those arguing Smalltalk is pure but C++ is not (in the 90s). Just what do you get when you treat a number as an object? Out of all the OO languages that I have seen, I like java the best.
The real attention of Ruby comes its killer application Rail: Ruby on Rail, which can do everybody's favorite MVC.
The neat idea is also associate controller object with a programmable html (like ASP, JSP).
Here is a great tutorial site: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html?page=1
With Ruby's rather strange language, I see little productivity.
I see in one article saying Ruby is programmers favorite toy now like Turbo Pascal was in the 80s. I failed to share this enthusiasm.
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