IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Obtenor_sl said:

And here I am as a Ruby Developer thinking "jeez, what a mess, in Ruby you only have to ask: variable.nil?"

That's why I guess I love the Ruby language, it's so like 'natural' language it scares me. 1..5 do { xyz }, or array.each ... or variable.nil?. So easier and natural to perform operations and checks.

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Some people are not crazy about the "magic" of higher level languages. Personally I find that learning c/c++ as a first language allows one a much deeper understanding of the higher level languages like ruby. The abstraction in such languages always bothers me as I prefer to understand what the hell is going on in my code.

Having said that, if the latest news about JRuby with truffle is not worthless hype and IF it will be accepted, when ready, by the wider community, it would be game changing for me. On top of that SciRuby has been accepted to Google Summer of Code which could mean that I'll be banging out ruby in a few years instead of putzing around with python and c++. That is unless Julia crushes the rest of languages used for scientific computation and then we will all just be using that So many choices, so little time.

Never looked at ruby or groovy, but is this performance comparison apt?

/var/log/mind

One of the common sins in software development is worrying about performance when you don't need to, but man, groovy/ruby having an order or two of magnitude higher run time is enough for me to never want to write any code in that language.

I feel like any project of significance I've ever worked on has had a need at some point to process a ton of data or doing something very CPU/memory intensive.

Cad_sl said:

Maybe it was mostly Rails but I spent a lot of time doing RoR for a startup and so much of the framework is behind the scenes, I spent a lot of time on google just trying to figure out what something does. I give much less of a shit about having pretty "readable" code as I do being able to figure out what is going on without spending half my day on google. I would prefer a much more explicit language for any important project.

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Its both. Lots of hand waving in Ruby/Rails. But with Ruby you can code something up in a fraction of the time it takes to do same in Java or C++. As far as scalability, lets just say not every company is Twitter and its not an issue.

Cad_sl said:

You can code it up in a fraction of the time assuming you're happy with the way Rails does it I guess. Soon as you need something weird it's 10 fucking hours on google again.

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I am with you. I am not a big fan of hand waving to produce "magic" (I mentioned as much a few posts back). Having said that, programming anything when you dont understand wtf is going on is going to take 10 hours of googling. I dont think its limited to Ruby. The benefit of ruby/rails is the speed at which you can put something together which is largely a result of having a very active community that has written tons of gems (libraries) to do nearly everything you need.

Cad_sl said:

Maybe its just the IDE's but I could take a java program and trace it and know exactly what was happening. With Ruby you had to "just know" that this gem overrode that call, because there's no explicit library calls, nothing really tells you it jumps to the controllers at X point, it just does it, etc. Granted, you can figure that out, but once again in java I could just trace the calls because they are explicit, I didn't have to google to figure out what struts does.

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I am sure the guys here that use Ruby full time will tell you that things have improved in the last 4-5 years.

Cad_sl said:

Yea, I always need to filter my responses with the "stopped programming a long time ago" disclaimer, but these topics are near and dear to my heart.

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Ruby is a recent addition to my hobbies. I primarily use Python (will be going balls deep into c++ over the summer as I have to do a bit of research in computational topology and c++ has decent libraries for it) Anyway, I wanted to write a few websites in my off time but hated the shit out of django for some weird reason. Grabbed a ruby (and later on railz) book or two and really liked the speed with which i can slap something not too shitty together. Its annoying when I look at something in ruby and every tiny thing is abstracted away but the fact that i learned c/c++ first allows me to easily figure out wtf is going on. Having said all that, I am no Ruby expert however I know that Ruby, and especially Railz, have gone through a pretty big change (for the better) in the last few versions. Its not as shitty as you imagine it to be if you havent touched it in 5-10 years.