Playing with Ruby

So, I've been peeking a bit at Ruby in tiny fractions of spare time over the last few weeks. Ruby is a fully object-oriented, dynamically typed, scripting language. It's designed to be fast, simple and powerful. It has closures which are just amazing (if difficult to describe), and the lack of types makes many common programming patterns much less of a chore.

I first heard about it a year or two ago from Greg Burd (he's the kind of guy who just knows what's cool before other people do).

I didn't really give Ruby another look until recently. Dave Thomas really pushes Ruby on a (somewhat confused) Java audience at the NoFluffJustStuff symposiums. I too was resistant, but Dave really does a hard sell on Ruby ... how could I resist something that's "a dog's breakfast, but it works!". Dave sealed the deal by sending me a copy of his book (Programming Ruby, aka "The PickAxe", which suffered an untimely death-by-NyQuil on the way out to ApacheCon and had to be replaced).

In fact, with the rolling over of the new year, I found a good use for Ruby ... a copyright updater for the Tapestry and HiveMind source code. I had written one in Python a ways back, but it was limited to Java files.

What I wanted was something a bit smarter ... that would be able to adapt to different types of files (Java, XML, properties) and would be able to update the copyright message, rather than overriding it. That is, convert:

# Copyright 2004 The Apache Software Foundation

To:

# Copyright 2004, 2005 The Apache Software Foundation

My trembling first journey into Ruby is this script, which does the work. It's sloppy, doesn't report errors well, and took me too long to write (almost as long as it would have in Java!) ... but it works and is impressively fast. In fact, I've been very surprised at just how fast Ruby is to load, parse and execute. Visibly faster than Python ... faster than Java I'd bet.

I may have to revise some of my comments in my upcoming TheServerSide Tech Talk (filmed last April).