Link to the thread:

/node/7023

Could see if this still works, or at least rip code off them as a start:  http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/griq.aspx

Heh maybe this weekend, I have not made an addon since early BC and alot of UI hooks have changed.

I must confess that I am seeing mixed signals here.  I would remind you of what I said in the other thread, "C# has a good deal going for it.  Having Anders Hejlsberg in the lead makes a huge difference.  I worked with him when I was an engineer at Borland.  C# has, therefore, a LOT in common with Delphi, which makes it a good thing."  I meant that then and still believe it now.  fwiw

 

Each language has bits that are better than other languages and which bits are better also vary.  Still, there is no reason not to have an opinion, and I will consider that I am allowed mine as others are allowed theirs.  I am including a memo that I wrote here at work.  In it, I advocate ruby over java.

 

Note:  This does not represent even half of the reasons I have for preferring ruby.  It is aimed at answering specific questions that were asked when I spoke with bosses on the subject.

 

Disclaimer:  I have tried to get rid of all the extra lines that the website keeps adding to this post.  After about 20 minutes of trying just to do that, I give up and will let the extra lines have their way rather than just delete the post in disgust.  Sorry about how long it is to read.  I tried to make it simple.

 

We use several languages for our website development.  Java, Java script, cold fusion, Delphi, PERL and even smalltalk and some fortran.  For what do we really want our programming language?  

 

1.  Well, it will have to perform well.  If it is too slow, too clunky or bug prone then it is useless.  

 

2.  It will need to be cost effective.  There are many very expensive website development solutions.  In my experience, off the shelf are sold as “one size fits all” which translates to a huge and monolithic system which has mounds of features which look cool in a sales demo but are rarely needed.  I have seen demos of such things right here at Vought.

 

3.  It should enough of an industry wide standard that we can find people who are skilled in its use.

 

4.  It should be simple enough that people that will be changing to it can master it without an oppressive learning curve.

 

5.  It should be well documented.  Preferably it should be well documented enough that there are several quality third party books teaching it from various angles.  

 

Each programming language has its devotees and detractors.  Here are my opinions on major languages.

 

1.  Java:  This is a workable and reliable language.  Its downfall is that it is verbose.  You need to write a lot of code to get things done.  

 

I think that we should use Ruby on Rails.

 

The language is more terse than Java and much more understandable.

 

Java:

 

new Date(new Date().getTime() - 20 * 60 * 1000)

 

Ruby:

 

20.minutes.ago

 

While being fluent in Java makes it much easier to figure out what is going on, even non programmers can see what the ruby is doing at a glance.  This very readable approach which makes going over unfamiliar code go much faster and easier.  It also is a large part of what makes ruby a language so beloved by its practitioners.

 

Now, here is the declaration of an empty class in both languages:

 

Java:

 

Class Circle

 

  private Coordinate center, float radius;

 

  public void setCenter(Coordinate center)

 

  {

 

    this.center = center;

 

  }

 

  public Coordinate getCenter()

 

  {

 

    return center;

 

  }

 

  public void setRadius(float radius)

 

  {

 

    this.radius = radius;

 

  }

 

  public Coordinate getRadius()

 

  {

 

    return radius;

 

  }

 

end;

 

Ruby:

 

class Circle

 

  attr_accessor :center, :radius

 

end

 

Believe it or not, the two code snippets are absolutely equal.  The getter and setter methods in Ruby code are generated automatically, so not only you do not have to write them, but they are not even there to clutter the code.  I have seen arguments from Java guys that stuff like this (i.e. the public static void main … thing, getters/setters and other boilerplate code) can be generated with any decent GUI like Eclipse (or by tools like XDoclet etc) is a non-issue. Well, as for their generation, let us say this is true. But for the readability of code it is absolutely not!

 

Now, let’s see a demonstration on the following task: Open the file ‘test.txt’ and write all the sentences to the console (one sentence per line) which contain the word ‘Ruby’. First, the Java solution:

 

Java

 

import java.io.BufferedReader;

 

import java.io.FileReader;

 

import java.io.IOException;

 

import java.util.regex.Matcher;

 

import java.util.regex.Pattern;

 

public class Test

 

{

 

    public static void main(String[] args)

 

    {

 

        try {

 

            BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("test.txt"));

 

            StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();

 

            String str;

 

            while ((str = in.readLine()) != null)

 

              { sb.append(str + "\n"); }            

 

            in.close();

 

            String result = sb.toString();

 

            Pattern sentencePattern = Pattern.compile("(.*?\\.)\\s+?");

 

            Pattern javaPattern = Pattern.compile("Ruby");

 

            Matcher matcher = sentencePattern.matcher(result);

 

            while (matcher.find()) {

 

                String match = matcher.group();

 

                Matcher matcher2 = javaPattern.matcher(match);

 

                if (matcher2.find())

 

                    System.err.println(match);

 

            }

 

        } catch (IOException e)

 

          {

 

            e.printStackTrace();

 

          }     

 

    }

 

}

 

It is quite straightforward what this relatively simple code snippet doing - but if this is straightforward, what should I say about the Ruby version?

 

Ruby

 

File.read('test.txt').scan(/.*?\. /).each { |s| puts s if s =~ /Ruby/ }

 

I read this in a thread about converting an Excel date to java date:

 

java.util.GregorianCalendar(1900, java.util.Calendar.JANUARY,1).add(java.util.Calendar.DATE, java.lang.Integer.parseInt(row3.DeliveryAttributSetDate)-1);

 

This is why people program in Ruby!

 

 

 

 

You might be mistaken. First, why would you want something to run on Windows?

Post-prologue: I agree on lines of code thing; I didn't reply to the prior post because I've got a lot going on and it's irrelevant except as a little puzzle; as some folks do crosswords or sudoku instead, the post itself doesn't bother me (note 'golf' in the subject).

I admit, Linux sucks, but with Microsoft you're paying an arm and a leg to do *anything*. I'd take Java in a heart beat over Microsoft if Ruby wasn't an applicable option. It has nothing to do with the language or "out of the box" capabilities. With the money saved by not depending on pay-for-use-closed-source development environments I can pay a developer who will write something better than microsoft provides out of the box. Sure, it'd be great if whatever you're writing is easily provided for by microsoft but in most cases I'm sure it's not. If microsoft made everything that easy and available we wouldn't have jobs and microsoft wouldn't have needed to pull down billions in debt over the last two quarters. Suffice to say they could have EASILY been "there" with product announcements they made in 2001 and they're not because they abandoned those projects (sql integration into winfs+exchange; getting rid of shitty 16/32bit interfaces; implementing consistent and elegant 64bit .NET interfaces and breaking backwards compatibility for things which need it; properly re-implementing exchange forms and VBA via .net et al).

Moreover, with Microsoft you're dealing with a talent pool of systems administrators who are used to a system which does everything for them and operates on the premise of support being available rather than detailed documentation and open source; microsoft has great (and I mean FANTASTIC) documentation however all of that comes to a screeching halt when you hit a limitation unless you've got a $mm contract with them. As a culminating result Microsoft has created a system that has derived an administration environment which requires multiple sysadmins to be on payroll and in most circumstances requires dedicated developers to be insulated from any type of system level access which they need to do their job well. As an example, you mentioned being able to spawn off a thread that doesn't die -- good luck getting a sysadmin to setup IIS or system policies for your app to have the appropriate permissions. I will give Microsoft that much - they've done an awesome job with their permissions and policies systems but the downfall of that is that building an application is a three-layer nightmare of security + sysadmin + application instead of just best practices + application. If this doesn't apply then it's only a matter of when not if, it will become a problem.

$25 Shared hosting is a bad idea. If you're hosting your content then everything on it is insecure. No arguments! I'm too familiar with windows and you NEVER want anyone else other than directly-hired authorized personnel to have any type of system access to a windows box; ie, shared hosting is out unless you don't care about the privacy of that AES encrypted data :) That said, ec2, softlayer, mt, etc. both support windows (dedicated system), so no real problems anyways. It's only up until this year that a Microsoft OS has really been secure from the outside, from the inside Microsoft still has a ways to go compared to Unix or Linux. I'm not conspiring on this, if you think windows is secure on the inside you've been sold fodder. There's a handful of security organizations which routinely find access-level compromises on a weekly basis and root-level compromises on a monthly basis. Unfortunately anyone who discovers a whole or bug or issue has to wait for one of these companies to discover it and for microsoft to patch it because nobody else has access to patch it themselves except by inefficient external insulation (ie, sysadmin task).

You're right, .NET/C# owns the domain of Windows UI applications. No arguments there but unfortunately the most profitable LOB technologies aren't Windows UI apps.

Just as a note, Rails is "ok" or "good" and Twitter's systems suck in many ways. Rails is good because it along with Ruby make developing on a team with revision control a BREEZE. Meta-programming exponentially increases code maintainability and as far as libraries are concerned (ie, AES), rubyforge or github will likely have a "gem" to do whatever you want. If you can't find a library you like or that does what you want you can easily bind to C calls to write your own (after all, .NET is just a bunch of calls to the CLR which itself is likely written in C). Which brings me to my next point...

The technology itself doesn't mean shit; while I disagree with Twitter folks on how they're doing things, the business model has nothing to do with the efficiency of the technical model as long as it Just Works and as long as their consumers are happy. Without happy consumers and a team of folks who work together they could have the best technical minds and the best programming language and still not create anything of value.

I've seen good projects, great projects, and shitty projects written on many platforms / languages / frameworks. Aside from corporate desktop apps for < 100 users, Microsoft's "just enough to secure paying dividends to shareholders" attitude trickles down to ineptitude at so many levels that productivity is greater with other systems. I will add another exception which is if you're using one of Microsoft's mainstream products and deploying some type of custom add-in which adds value, for example, a module for handling XYZ business with one of their accounting packages; there is a place Microsoft excels. This of course provides for the ultimate dichotomy that when you're writing a significant Application with Microsoft, just like Apple's "App Store", you're competing directly with Microsoft.

The movements which bring me to these statements are Software Assurance, Microsoft Dynamics, and Microsoft's general shift towards outsourcing support and generating revenue through acquisitions instead of ingenuity.

As a software and systems development company, Microsoft is dead. They're smart though because that entire market has peaked which makes their acquisitions and Media (XBox is awesome) initiatives a profitable move.

.NET+CLR is a patch that just covers up more shit. C# is a lucky stroke and exists only because they could afford one of the best language developers who incidentally created a language which could carry forward their shit interfaces for a few more years.

You can bet your job that if Microsoft doesn't reinvent themselves with whatever follows .NET and Windows7 that Google, Cisco, Oracle, or some combination of corporate-backed open source systems will be your new employer and a far better kool-aid in 5-10 years. At the same time Microsoft will most likely remain profitable and probably has the talent and capability to continue on for 15 years without a hitch, just not with desktop or Internet software (they'll make more money doing something else instead).

This is my analysis about Msft I couldn't post ingame. This is the short version without references. The long version might as well be a book on the amazing feats Microsoft has performed, their current critical state (over 5 years anyways), and what can be expected of their future performance.

Holy COW!  I put this here for fun.  You turned it into a holy war and fired a full broadside.  If it is not fun, forget about it.  Full on rants are unproductive and I do not want a fight.  As I have said elsewhere, people want different things and there is no "one size fits all" so why go ballistic over something that I have said elsewhere is just for fun and entirely trivial?

Relax.  Have some chocolate.  Life will be the better for it.