TikiRobot! » ruby

Ruby 1.9 gains block-level scope

rajbot — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 23:06:35 +0000

I was watching this Google TechTalk that Yukihiro Matsumoto gave on Ruby and learned that Ruby 1.9 had block-level scope.. cool!

Apparently, block scope is some sort of thing with me:

Ruby is SERIOUS BUSINESS!

rajbot — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 06:36:37 +0000

Tim Bray is MAD that RubyConf was on a weekend. _why agrees:

People, Ruby isn’t a game. It isn’t a hobby. It’s certainly not a very good food source and it’s not an article of clothing. You can’t just put Ruby in the wash with a load of whites. Nice try, but no. No. Jeez, grow a brain. Ruby isn’t a tambourine you can bang loudly in my ear. I’m trying to use my iPhone here, guy.

And Ruby is not some bachelor’s party with a foxy lady in a sherlock holmes hat. Hardly: Ruby is all dads. Put a petticoat on, woman. Pop those balloons. We’re all getting paid here and we’re all having kids here. Get with the program.

Ruby is serious business. Real business and totally bankable. Fact: You cannot do it late at night. The office is closed during those hours. You should be in bed like all the other dads. Now, have a nightcap and go put your PJs on, we’ve got to wake up early tomorrow, it’s pancake day.

I love why. Read the whole thing, it’s spot on.

Shoes, a Tiny Toolkit for Making Web-like Desktop Apps

rajbot — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 23:25:40 +0000

Shoes is a new project by the infamous why:

Shoes is a very informal GUI toolkit. It’s for making regular old windowing apps. It’s a blend of my favorite things from the Web, some Ruby style, and a sprinkling of cross-platform widgets. (More in the README.)

Check out the book reader tutorial on Hackety.org

simple screenshots:

Why??? The Lucky Stiff!

rajbot — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 06:59:56 +0000

why is an interesting animal. He’s a hacker who works on open source projects, including the amazing Hackety Hack, a tool for teaching programming to kids. He wrote the Poignant Guide to Ruby, he draws comics, he plays in a band, he posts funny pictures. He can make code look pretty, even javascript. Just who is this why? He’s got his own wiki page, which provides no answers.

Example Scripts: REST web services and system calls

rajbot — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 09:35:02 +0000

I’ve been translating all the new perl and php scripts I write into Python and Ruby in order to learn more about those two languages. I checked some more example scripts into SourceForge, which might be useful for others who know one of these languages and want to learn a new one.

These scripts are available in perl, php, python, and ruby:

How to query a REST web api using HTTP GET and parsing the XML response.
How to make a system call and read the return value.

The REST Web Service PHP and Perl scripts don’t work in Mac OS X, because OS X doesn’t ship with Perl’s XML::Simple or PHP’s simplexml. More surprisingly, OS X doesn’t ship with Perl’s LWP module.

I’m starting to like Ruby more every day. It would be nice if Ruby and Python had a XML::Simple equivalent in their standard distributions.

Example scripts: directory listing in perl, php, python, and ruby

rajbot — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 08:36:17 +0000

I remember when I fell in love with Perl. It was the summer of 1995, and peliom and I had just met, and were working at the Lab. Postscript hacking using MacPerl on OS 8. It was beautiful.

That was more than ten years ago, and even though I’ve remained a Perl hacker the whole time, I see massive amounts of development happening on Python and Ruby, and the Perl community seems to be slowing down (what’s up with Perl 6 anyway?), so, despite the lack of block-level scope, I think it might finally be time to move on.

I don’t know enough about either Python or Ruby to figure out which to learn, so I’ll learn them both, and deal with choosing one later. Along the way I’ll post some example scripts. Anyone else making the jump from Perl or PHP to something modern might find these useful. Here is the first example: printing out a directory listing using readdir and glob in your favorite scripting language:

[perl]

!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $dir = ‘/’;

Use readdir
_______________________________________________________________________________

print “Directory listing in perl of $dir using readdir\n”;
opendir(HANDLE, $dir) or die “Cannot opendir $dir: $!”;
foreach my $file (readdir(HANDLE)) {
print “\t$file\n”;
}
closedir(HANDLE);

Use globbing
_______________________________________________________________________________

print “Directory listing in perl of $dir using globbing\n”;
foreach my $file (glob(“/*”)) {
print “\t$file\n”;
}
[/perl]

[python]

!/usr/bin/python

import os
import dircache
import glob

dir = “/”

Use os.listdir
_______________________________________________________________________________

print “Directory listing in python of ” + dir + ” using os.listdir”
files = os.listdir(dir)
for file in files:
print “\t” + file

Use dircache
_______________________________________________________________________________

print “Directory listing in python of ” + dir + ” using dircache”
files = dircache.listdir(dir)
for file in files:
print “\t” + file

Use glob
_______________________________________________________________________________

print “Directory listing in python of ” + dir + ” using glob”
files = glob.glob(“/*”)
for file in files:
print “\t” + file
[/python]

[ruby]

!/usr/bin/ruby

dir = “/”

Use foreach
_______________________________________________________________________________

print “Directory listing in ruby of #{dir} using Dir.foreach\n”
Dir.foreach(dir) {|file| print “\t#{file}\n” }

Use glob
_______________________________________________________________________________

print “Directory listing in ruby of #{dir} using Dir.glob\n”
files = Dir.glob(“/*”)
files.each do |file| print “\t#{file}\n” end
[/ruby]

These scripts, as well as a PHP version, are checked in at SourceForge.

Pair Programming

may — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 02:57:27 +0000

I never understood what pair programming was until now. Glad someone drew a picture for me. (found on Pivotal blabs).

Lie Down on the Tracks

peliom — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 23:50:18 +0000

Today I’m learning what this Ruby on Rails thingy is all about. As you can see from the screencasts, it’s a web development environment optimized for Hackers on Speed. But I’m thinking I might be able to crank out a page or two. Apparently textmate is required equipment.

I think my CGI.pm days are over :-(

Link to Ruby on Rails