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ruby in steel

 

#9 - February 2006
Huw and Bethan the dog wrestle with a tricky programming problem....
The Editor seen here in conference

Index to this month's issue

Why do people keep inventing new programming languages…?

 

You’d think that, by now, there must be a language for every taste. If you like objects, you can choose Smalltalk, Java, C# or a few hundred others that have objects bolted on around the edges. If you want to do every dirty trick in the book, C++ should do nicely. Basic aficionados have a huge choice of dialects. Then there is Cobol and Fortran, Eiffel, Lisp, APL, Rebol, Algol, Prolog, PHP, Perl and Python.

And yet, languages still keep appearing. One of the most interesting of these, in my opinion, is Ruby. A fairly new language, Ruby is gaining a great deal of interest from forward-looking programmers but has yet to be widely adopted as a mainstream development technology. This may be due, in part, to the lack of good development tools (though the FreeRIDE development environment is starting to make good progress); and it is certainly due in part to the lack of simple deployment. Currently the main programming framework for Ruby is called Rails. This is a fine system which, once properly installed, makes relatively light work of creating web database applications such as Blogs.

However, getting Ruby and Rails up and running can be a bit of a pain. Even on a local PC, you will have to mess around with a number of separate components – not only the usual combination of a server such as Apache and a database such as MySQL but also one or more variants of CGI. You may then have to run scripts from command prompts and edit a number of Apache and Rails configuration files. When I asked the Bitwise web hosts whether they would support Ruby on Rails, I was told that – for the time at least – they had no such plans. Frankly, I was not surprised. They told me that they had concerns about a number of technical issues including poor integration with Apache and the CPanel web site control panel.

For the time being, Ruby on Rails remains an interesting development platform which, however, you might not want to bet the bank (or your web site) on. Even so, Ruby is a language to watch. You can expect some in-depth coverage in Bitwise soon.

This month, however, we are looking at a more established language: Pascal. If you’d thought that Pascal was dead, think again. Not only is the language central to the Borland Developer Studio which we reviewed last month but it has also now been integrated into Microsoft’s Visual Studio in the form of RemObjects’ Chrome.

For more thoughts on the evolutionary struggle currently being waged by programming languages at the moment, see this month’s Bytegeist.

Huw Collingbourne
(Editor)


In this month's bitwise...

Chrome 1.5 : Object Pascal for Visual Studio .NET - review
i-Sound WMA MP3 Recorder 6.6 : PC audio recording tool
Pamela 1.3 : a dedicated Skype recorder
Demo Builder 5 : smooth screen recording with Flash output
Review: Diskeeper 10 : Hard disk degragmentation
ChinesePod : Chinese by podcast
Roundup of 2005 : Check on the features you missed in Biwtwise
Mathematical Digressions : Wilf muses on the maths of the mint humbug...
Borland's ECO III : Bob Swart on Enterprise Common Objects
Bytegeist - It's Life, Jim! - the strange evolution of programming languages
Rants and Raves : crashed discs (of the Martian kind?)


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