tisdag, maj 08, 2007

JRuby on the technical general session

Charles O Nutter and Tor Norbye just got on stage here, and showed of deploying Mephisto as a WAR-file, and then changing it to add text-to-speech functionality, with a Java library that generates an audio file. The total code they wrote on stage was about 10 lines of Ruby... The power of Java and Ruby together: it's beautiful.

I already knew what they would do, having helped fix many of the issues getting in the way for Mephisto, but it's still incredibly cool. Charles and Tor got several impromptu applauds from the audience too, so I'm pretty sure people think it's neat.

Right now, I'm starting to get curious why people continue to use the term "scripting language". It doesn't seem to fit either Ruby nor Groovy anymore. Oh well. Nitpicking.

Next up is Arun Gupta. He's talking about jMaki and Phobos, both very nice usages of JavaScript and other languages.

4 kommentarer:

Unknown sa...

My colleague and I have the scripting language debate as well. I do _not_ think it is nitpicking. With so many people (including my bosses) thinking ruby is a second rate language only fit for system administration scripting, this terminology adds to the pain.

Anonym sa...

I agree that the term scripting language is misleading at best and destructive at worst, but most people, me included, want to differentiate the "scripting" languages from languages like Java if not only to show that it's another (and better) way of writing programs. The scripting languages term is there for lack of better alternatives.

Seanicus sa...

That's why I think the term 'dynamic languages' works better, although it is imprecise. To me, scripting language means something that is executed in a limited environment, such as a web browser or other host application.

David Roussel sa...

To me 'scripting language' means a language you can write a shell script in, starting with #!/usr/bin/ruby
The script can be linear and define no functions.

A programming language has a harder write/run cycle, and is less good for writing shell scripts.

It's good to be a scripting language, as long a people know you can be a programming language too.