Life is simple! Don’t make it complicated

Pros and Cons of Ruby

Keith Brady, Australia>> What are the pros and cons of Ruby that are being discussed in the development community and what is your opinion on that?

Ezra>> The pros of Ruby are the super fast development cycle. You can truly build bigger software faster with a smaller team then other languages. Ruby is also a very fun and elegant language to use, you will find yourself directly expressing your thoughts with Ruby code before too long.

The cons of Ruby are with the current implementation of the interpreter. It is not the fastest language around and has a very conservative garbage collector which means Ruby tends to use a lot of memory if you aren’t careful. We are working on fixing these issues with our Rubinius project

Bruce>> Ruby is my language of choice because the syntax doesn’t get in my way, and the object model is pure. Since Ruby is highly dynamic, it’s easy for advanced developers to build their own languages to solve critical problems, and beginners get the benefits of using those programs. That means that there’s less to type, understand, and debug. For example, a programmer can open up a number class and add methods to convert to hours, minutes, days, and weeks. In code, you might see something like 10.days, which is much more readable than some unwieldy constant.

There’s a down side to all of that freedom, too. Ruby is like a sharp knife. You can carve something beautiful with it quickly. You can cut your thumb off, too.

Ian>> Matz has said that his goal in creating Ruby was to optimize for programmer happiness. The language’s advantages and disadvantages stem from that decision. Ruby has an Algol-like syntax for familiarity, dynamic typing for “sketchability,” a little bit of Lisp’s and Smalltalk’s power so that enterprising coders can extend the language, and a few of Perl’s shortcuts.

On the downside, optimizing for the programmer has meant that interpreter implementors have traditionally had to make performance sacrifices (though see the obsessive effort that has gone into making Ruby 1.9 and JRuby faster). And Ruby doesn’t support quite the level of on-the-fly modification of programs that, say, Smalltalk and Lisp do.

Full article at here.

Tags: Rubinius, Ruby