[OT] Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday

[Rodney Somerstein]

Dan,

I have to say that in looking at Ruby today I came to a similar 
conclusion to yours. I think Ruby is probably best loved by people 
switching from Perl. It seems to have many of the same 
characteristics, such as many ways to do things and ways to 
abbreviate the code so as to make it harder to read. I found a site 
that had a good comparison of Ruby and Python and the Python code all 
seemed very readable while I had a hard time understanding the Ruby 
code. Note that I'm not a Python expert. I've played with it just a 
very little bit over the years, but the code seems very readable for 
anyone that has programmed in just about any language.

Ruby on Rails looks to be a tremendously effective approach to create 
Ajax (Asychronous JavaScript and XML) applications. For the best 
known application using Ajax, take a look at Google maps if you 
haven't seen it. This is an exciting time of possibilities when you 
think of what kinds of applications we are likely to start seeing on 
the Web. We will finally start seeing more Web applications that feel 
like standalone apps without requiring a player of some sort to be 
embedded in the browser. The downside right now is that Ruby on Rails 
does require using Ruby. I suspect Python will catch up soon if it 
hasn't already. I don't know whether Revolution can already 
effectively play in this environment or not.

-Rodney