Michael Greenly

A Slow Goodbye to Ruby

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0500

I've been using Ruby as my primary development language for over a decade now. It's been a wonderful tool but my requirements have changed. Quickness of delivery is still very important to me but it no longer trumps runtime performance at all costs.

One Language To Rule Them All

I spent a very long time trying to find one language that could satisfy all my needs, for work and play. I've given serious attention to Go, Clojure, Erlang, Elixir, Haskell and Scheme. None of them did everything I wanted.

I eventually realized my goal of finding a single language for work and play was just to ambitious.

"Go" For Work

My primary work requirements include; a large selection of libraries for web development, good development tools, large community, posix friendly behavior, performant runtime, and a quick iterative development process. It turns out Go covers all those points nicely.

I was only overlooking it because I found the language so boring.

Moving forward I'll be transitioning to Go for the majority of my work needs.

"Haskell"

I've just recently abandoned my third significant attempt to fall in love with Haskell. It's certainly a wonderful language but I'm finally willing to admit it's just not for me. It's not because I don't get it. It's just that I don't like like lazy evaluation, the extra ceremony of monads or it's syntax.

"OCaml"

I've recently started to explore OCaml. At least from the outside it looks like Haskell with eager evaluation, side effects and a more regular syntax. At this point I'm very hopeful but we'll see how I feel in a few weeks. I'm sure it has some rough edges somewhere.

One Language For Play.

When I'm done surveying languages, I think OCaml is the last, I'll select one language to focus on for a few years. I want to truly master one language.

At this point it looks like that language will most likely be OCaml or Scheme.

Gauche Scheme for Ruby Programmers

Thu, 03 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0500

If you're a Ruby programmer that's interested in Scheme and haven't yet taken the plunge, I recommend trying Gauche Scheme.

Ruby is often described as being very lisp like. I find Gauche to be the most Ruby like lisp.

Gauche is actively developed
conforms to the most current Scheme standard (R7RS)
Starts extremely fast which is excellent for scripts.
Supports native threads and has no GIL.
Supports UTF-8 by default.
Supports regular expressions.
Everything is an object.
Uses a Common Lisp like object system (CLOS) that supports multiple dispatch.
Provides a complete API over standard POSIX system calls.
Includes a high level interface for evented IO built on Posix select.
Supports extensions through C much like Ruby.
Comes with a well structured and fairly complete standard library.
Includes many SRFI by default.

What Gauche is missing compared to Ruby is the vast ecosystem of external libraries, tools, and users.

What it provides instead is everything you'd expect from Scheme which makes a great foundation for building all the rest.

If you happen to be running Linux you can install it with gsi.

If you're on any other operating system the Gauche website provides excellent instructions here

Also, if you're a Vim user (many Ruby programmers are), I strongly recomend tmux, vim-slime and paredit.

If you're really new to Scheme here's some material that may help you get started.

Programming Languages

Sun, 29 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0500

About a year ago I decided I wanted to learn a new programming language but I didn't know which, so I spent a year investigating my options.

If you are considering something similar I'd recommend looking at one descendant of Forth, Lisp, ML, Prolog and Smalltalk.

Each takes a truly unique approach to computing.