Programming in latest greatest language = bad.
Time is an investment in your future, when you take the time to learn a language, you have invested in yourself. If you pick some new on the block language like Ruby on Rails is that a good investment?
Time is an investment in your future, when you take the time to learn a language, you have invested in yourself. If you pick some new on the block language like Ruby on Rails is that a good investment?
I never got past the part where you have to make a configuration file or something to generate the code for your page. That just seems to me a bad idea. I realize now that is just the RoR part to make getting into Ruby easier.
The one configuration file you have to set up when you first start a Rails project is database.yml. It tells Rails how to talk to your database. There are two fields for you to fill in, "database" and "password". The rest of the fields are filled in automatically.
Here's an example database.yml file. Notice that it has three environments (development, production, and test), and that different databases are used for each. If you're developing your application, you're using yourapp_dev. Rails uses yourapp_test during unit testing:
common: &common
adapter: mysql
host: localhost
username: root
password: somepassword
development:
database: yourapp_dev
<<: *common
production:
database: yourapp_prod
<<: *common
test:
database: yourapp_test
<<: *common
foo()
foo
foo(a,b,c,d,function() {
console.log("some callback")
})
foo(a,b,c,d) do
puts "some callback"
end
foo(a,b,c,d) { puts "some callback" }
It's mostly the fact that it -looks- cleaner in all the right places that makes it appealing. That and the massively powerful web framework built on top of it.
Basically this is another way to make your loop looks nicer but nothing more.
You could argue this case if the language in the topic is something like LISP or Haskell compare to the C-based languages.
Yes, Ruby is dynamic. It's so dynamic that you have open classes so you can dynamically insert methods. It has deep introspection. It has closures. It has #method_missing which lets you do some interesting things. Basically, Ruby is just powerful enough, just over that tipping point, so programmers wind up doing metaprogramming (programs that write programs) more than they would in other languages. I'm sure Paul Graham has an article or two on the power of languages (smiley face here), and in at least one of them, he suggests that some people might mistake Ruby for a dialect of LISP.
See why_the_lucky_stiff's tutorial on D&D metaprogramming (Dwemthy's Array section at http://qa.poignantguide.net/chapter-6.html) and Rich Kilmer's use of Ruby for an aircraft management DSL (you'll have to google for that example). It's not that metaprogramming is impossible in C/C++ because you could always build a whole mechanism from the ground-up. (In other words, at some point you can claim that all these languages are Turing equivalent if I remember correctly.) The point is that some languages make interesting ways of programming easier, and when you hang out among the practioners of that language, you begin to see different ways of coding. This is why I've got Erlang on my TODO list, if I can squeeze it in my schedule.
is equivalent to
foo "
Man, I hate that 'feature' of Ruby. In Python, foo is the function, foo() the result of calling it. So much cleaner.
Objective C is fully dynamic. Typing is entirely optional. If you give every type declaration the type 'id', it's effectively the same as using 'var' in e.g. javascript.
I'm not sure what you mean by C-based, but I'm guessing ObjC would fall in your definition.
The time investment to learn a new language isn't linear.. It seems logarithmic. Learning the basic syntax details does take a little time, but then you can start thinking in that new language.
The learning curve only gets gentler as you learn more languages.