Seebs <usenet-nospam@seebs.net> writes:

> On 2010-06-05, Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The question you should be posing is: why do you believe writing a program in ruby is easier than in
>> any other language?
>
> For the sorts of things it's good at, Ruby is a particularly expressive
> language, and for large categories of problems, I would usually expect that
> I could have something working reliably in Ruby in a tiny fraction of the
> time it would take me to get something comparable working reliably in C.
>
> There are, of course, tradeoffs. It's not going to execute as quickly as
> the C code, for instance.
>
> But if I were doing, say, some kind of dynamic web content, I would take
> Ruby over C in nearly all cases. *Nearly* all, mind.

I think I would if I was starting again. Neither were widespread or
mature enough when I started my application. I need to use C or similar
for the core route-planning function (a big "shortest path" calculation)
and ended up developing from what was a configuration language around
this to a full scripting language.

Today I'd use Ruby or Python calling back to C for the clever stuff. It
wouldn't have been half as much fun to write though (is there anything
as much fun as writing a language?).
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