toniBlog

10 good reasons to switch to Ruby

toni — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:51:14 +0000

I’ve been working for three months with ruby now, I feel like I need to write down a list of the top 10 things I loved about the language.

Writing ruby code is a pleasure

Before switching to ruby I did lost my interest in writing software, I was totally bored of writing lots of bolier template patterns stuff, lots of lines of code, maintaining huge deployment scripts, build files. With ruby I rediscovered the passion for writing software, the syntax is just awesome and very rich: tasks that may require a lot of ugly silly code in java/c# can be written in a very expressive form in a line.

Deployment

Capistrano is just magically wonderful, it gives you for free so many features that are missed in the not ruby world, you can be up and running with a capistrano deploy script in minutes, deploy is safe, predictable, repeatable.

Available libraries and dependency management

Gems are just the best system for dependency management I ever seen, and the gems that are generally popular for ruby are definitely powerful.

Write less, do more

With ruby you write less code, less code means less maintenance, code more readable, less tests to write, less tests to maintain, you will go live quicker.

Quicker development cycle

An obvious consequence of all the other points listed in this blog post but also, since the language is dynamic you won’t wait for compilation or to reload the application in your server.

No xml, really no xml

No more xml, what a win

No (n)ant

There must have been a day where ant has been good but I can’t remember when it was. Ant scripts are a pain to maintain and write, it’s one of the biggest fail of the Apache Foundation (Maven is another big fail)

Microframeworks

Another big difference with the usual C#/Java world is that you don’t get huge beasts frameworks like what it is Spring now, gems (a part from Rails) are usually quite small and they just do the job they are supposed to do.

To mention few: Sinatra, Haml, mongo…

It’s dynamic

See this quite long blog post.

You’ll be faster, it’s guaranteed

I prefer small monitors over big monitors

toni — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:05:12 +0000

Having big monitors seems like a must have these days in software development.

I never liked them, I remember having this conversation with Felix and Graham years ago, I didn’t change my opinion, I am actually writing a blog post to reinforce my believes.

Big is bad

Big is bad because a big monitor is a wall between you and your team, with a couple of 21+ monitors in front of you I bet you can’t neither see anymore your colleagues face, it blocks conversations.

Big will tempt you to write less readable code, longer, larger code base with more space on the screen you will be tempted in doing it.

Small is awesome

We all work here with mac laptops, I am pretty happy with a 12″ mac, I don’t miss a huge monitor, I can move my mac around the office, I can see the face of my colleagues.

Some tools are not helping you: tools such as visual studio, eclipse and intellij require a lot of not so necessary space on the screen, I admit that with those tools it would be hard; using textmate, emacs or vim you will be fine.

Small is eco-friendly, you can’t argue with this one.

Where big is still good

As information radiator or for your home tv, that’s it.

Java vs Ruby vs Clojoure

toni — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:38:17 +0000

Java:

Time spent to think on what to write: 0

Time spent in writing: 60

Clojure:

Time spent to think on what to write: 30

Time spent in writing: 5 (if you’re good with brackets)

Ruby:

Time spent to think on what to write: 5

Time spent in writing: 5

links for 2010-06-22

toni — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 08:01:13 +0000

RubyAMP

(tags: ruby textmate autocomplete)
RVM and Textmate – Mostly Sane

(tags: ruby textmate rvm)