RoR etc

OK, i haven’t posted in ages, but what can I say, life is keeping me busy. Recovering from a bit of minor surgery, followed by a long Easter break, followed by stomach flu, consumed the past few weeks.

But, more importantly than all that, I changed jobs at the end of January, and am now spending most of my work time (not to mention free time) programming with Ruby on Rails!

Ah, ruby. I’ve used python for a variety of side projects over the past few years, and I’ve long held the opinion that the two languages are largely equal, but in the short time since I started using ruby full-time, I’ll admit that I’ve started acquiring a definite ruby bias. Things like ruby’s block syntax, for instance, don’t really have a corresponding language feature in python (at least, not anything quite as succinct).

Above all though, I’m mainly happy to be back in the world of dynamic languages. At my last job, I spent two years using C++, which taught me a lot: mainly that I don’t like C++. In fact, I’ve started to get the feeling that using C++ at all, when other options are available, is in many cases a textbook example of premature optimization. You end up consuming lots more programmer-hours (which means greater expense, and later releases) chasing the chimera of an end-product which “runs faster” than a similar program written in a dynamic language would run. I put “runs faster” in quotes because in reality, most software is I/O-bound most of the time (either waiting for user input, or waiting for disk or network traffic), so the amount of time that your particular program is actually running is probably pretty small (and getting smaller as CPU speeds increase), no matter what language it’s written in.