Why is Ruby the best programming language?
By spiderman05
@spiderman05 (851)
Canada
February 8, 2007 1:01pm CST
Here are some reasons that make Ruby my favorite programming language:1- Ruby is an object-oriented language in a strong sense, even integers are objects who respond to messages and events.
2- Ruby has a powerful built-in regular expressions engine which makes it suitable for applications where analyzing huge amounts of textual data is required.
3- Ruby is very permissive when it comes to data types (duck typing). This allows to write more generic programs.
4- The syntax of Ruby is very concise. A line of Ruby can do what 10 lines of C++ can achieve.
5- Ruby has a very simple network library.
6- Ruby has a very intuitive library to parse XML files.
7- Ruby can nicely be integrated with a MySQL data base.
8- Ruby has an interesting class for generating RSS feeds.
3 people like this
7 responses
@pizzoli (3366)
• Italy
8 Feb 07
Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.
He has often said that he is “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple,” in a way that mirrors life.
Building on this, he adds:
Ruby is simple in appearance, but is very complex inside, just like our human body1.
1 person likes this
@spiderman05 (851)
• Canada
9 Feb 07
Ruby on rails is a library built on top of Ruby. It allows to create web applications very quickly. It uses a programming model called MVC (Model-View-Control).
Briefly, Ruby on rails could be used to replace PHP e.g. in creating dynamic web sites.
I still use javascript and some PHP to create dynamic web pages and Ruby for everything which is done off line. Though, I will ultimately move to Ruby on rails when in gets more popular with web hosting providers.
@babayangu (44)
• Kenya
1 Nov 07
ruby is the latest. I dont realy like new things ...see whats happening with vista cant even connect a usb flash disk. I would use the tried and tested software before the new stuff
@spiderman05 (851)
• Canada
7 Nov 07
True for software. Though the situation is different for programming languages. Language designers generally try to combine the positive features of previous languages and avoid the negative ones.
@dj_faheem (738)
• Pakistan
9 Mar 07
i heared ruby first time thanks to share it dude thanks to all
1 person likes this
@spiderman05 (851)
• Canada
13 Apr 07
I am happy that you learned about Ruby here. It is a great language.
@ThunderCrash (334)
• Germany
9 Feb 07
I never heard of Ruby. I only know C++ and Visual Basic 6 to 2005 Express Edition. Is there somewhere a freeware editor / compiler for ruby or is it like Visual Basic 6 that you'll need to buy one for 150$?
1 person likes this
@spiderman05 (851)
• Canada
9 Feb 07
Ruby is an interpreted languge and it is 100% free. You can download the software and the documentation here:
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
The best book and the bible of Ruby is the book of Dave Thomas, called "Programming Ruby". The first edition of this book is free and available on the internet. The second editions is not free, I paid around 45$ two years ago for it.
@anonymili (3138)
•
15 Oct 07
I had never heard of Ruby before I saw your discussion and did a bit of looking around, and it does seem to be the overall opinion that it is the best. We have been using C++ and Java at our office and in recent times we're going over to C# - although I'm not a developer so it's all pretty much over my head LOL! It is good to find out more about these things though and your discussion and the subsequent responses has actually taught me something today so thanks for that :)
1 person likes this
@spiderman05 (851)
• Canada
18 Oct 07
I am glad that this discussion taught you something new.
Ruby was designed in 1995 in Japan, but it only gained popularity recently. I like it because it has a clean syntax and allows programmers to be more productive (compared to C++ or Java). On the other hand, the performance of programs written in C/C++ is better than that of those written in Ruby.
C# is very popular nowadays, mostly big the big beast (read Microsoft) is behind it. Many job offers nowadays require people who know C#.
@web2samus (255)
• Uruguay
13 Apr 07
haven't tried Ruby yet but it has very good recommendations from my friends, it's one of the next thing I'm going to review in the next weeks
@spiderman05 (851)
• Canada
4 May 07
It is a very concise language. Today, I was reading the documentation of the PHP HTTP class. The class looked so bulky and complicated compared to its Ruby counterpart.
@cnetboss (2473)
• Philippines
15 Oct 07
I agree with you that Ruby Language is the best programming language aside from its an open source language, it is also simple to understand.
