[ale] Ruby vs C, a non-technical chat

[James Sumners]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 10:38 AM, Dylan Northrup <ale at doc-x.net> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 9:44 AM, James Sumners <james.sumners at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > That's an important bit of information. Under such circumstances my
> > preference is for Python. I just like the language better (truly, I can't
> > stand the sight of Ruby). As for contrived performance, they're pretty
> much
> > even -- http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/ruby.php
>
> Glad to know you're using objective criteria for your evaluation of
> languages.  I think semantically important white space is one of the
> stupidest ideas to ever be implemented in any scripting language and
> prefer Ruby over Python (having come to it from Perl).  I also like
> flexibility in my approach to solving a problem, something that seems
> antithetical to the Python philosophy where there's One True Way to
> solve every problem.
>

I don't use Python very often, but I've never encountered a "One True Way"
to do anything in it. Example, this question has multiple solutions --
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/693630/alter-all-values-in-a-python-list-of-lists

It's been so long since I even attempted to learn Ruby that I can't recall
my exact qualms with the language. But being able to read the code is a
rather large point as far as I'm concerned. And the "let's be as terse as
we absolutely possibly can be" nature of Ruby makes it illegible to me.


>
> I do systems scripting for a large portion of my day job.  I find a
> lot of the work I do is in bash/shell since "it's everywhere".  The
> next fallback is ruby as we're a Chef shop and it's on all my systems


Yep. Most of my systems scripting is done in plain old Bash. It's only when
the scripting is going to be more like a full fledged program that I resort
to something else.


> > One of the things to consider is who else will have to maintain your
> code?
> > Which languages do they prefer or are proficient with? Around my shop
> we've
> > had a Ruby guy leave which meant all his stuff died because no one knows
> the
> > language (or cares to).
>
> Did his code do something important? Was it important to the business?
>  If so, it doesn't matter whether or not someone "cares to" maintain
> it or not.  Hell, there's a ton of code I'd love to re-write, but a)
> it works, b) it's business critical and c) I'm too busy doing other
> work to get into a pissing match about whether or not it's written in
> a bad language and needs to be re-done in a good language.
>

Most of it was an ad-hoc application to make management of a truly shitty
application easier. But when you have 3 people to manage a whole
university's backend systems development needs, figuring out strange
platforms shifts way down on the list of important things.

So the application was just plain killed.


-- 
James Sumners
http://james.sumners.info/ (technical profile)
http://jrfom.com/ (personal site)
http://haplo.bandcamp.com/ (band page)
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