[MacRuby-devel] Show MacRuby? - a start...

[Robert Cloud]

Sure, but be forewarned that I'm not very well aware of the full abilities of irb

I'm actually in the sciences and am only doing Cocoa programming as a hobby.  After laboring for a couple of years with C as my primary language, I became enlightened about interpreted languages and have really no desire to go back to the old days. Specifically I love the interactivity.  I have a terrible memory and often need help so having immediate gratification if you will is quite nice.   

The more interesting features of iPython are primarily for scientists or those that need parallel processing(interactive parallel programming across large clusters is brilliant).  There was a demonstration at PyCon of controlling 100,000 nodes from an iPython session.


As for the features more interesting for those on this list…

 With recent releases(.11 was a major overhaul) we got a QT based client which provides lookup of methods, classes, suggestions while you type.  That is quite nice.  There is also a mathematica style notebook that you can use to write code through the web browser.  Again nice..  

I hardly use the above tools, but I really like the magic commands.  Interacting with the computer just as you would with bash is killer.  You can browse documentation in the terminal(and their docstrings).  I realize that it is possible to extend irb to do this, but iPython's implementation is quite nice.  Inherent tab completion is great as well.  But fundamentally the stability of the program is great.   

I see the appeal of MacRuby and have tried my best to get into Ruby(reading several books on it, as well as the MacRuby one) but I have difficulty, primarily because I feel that the major advantage of an interpreted language(i.e. the interactivity) is lacking because in my opinion the shell is inferior to what I am used to.   

Also, I love Python's batteries included philosophy.  If one of the advantages of using cocoa with a scripting language is offloading tasks to the native capabilities of the scripting language's library, then Python wins hands down IMO.   

Best Regards  

--  
Robert Cloud
http://www.robertlouiscloud.com
http://www.robertcloudphotography.com


On Friday, February 10, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

>  
> On Feb 10, 2012, at 10:52 AM, Robert Cloud <rcloud at gmail.com (mailto:rcloud at gmail.com)> wrote:
> > Thanks for this, I will definitely find it helpful.  I must confess that I have a tormented relationship with MacRuby.  I am a Pythonista and have found it extremely hard to move to the Ruby world.  My major issue with the language is the irb shell.  I definitely do not want to start a flame war, but I find it vastly inferior to iPython, especially iPython's newer releases.  Second, it frequently crashes when I do anything wrong syntactically.  I do appreciate MacRuby being a better accessor to Cocoa but in general don't think it is quite ready.  Instead I prototype my code in PyObjC and then implement it in Obj-C.   
> I doubt that even the most ardent MacRuby admirer would claim that IRB (or MacRuby's "REPL", to old folks like me) is a totally awesome interactive development environment.  I've seen a few prototypes at something better / Cocoaish / IDEish in the past as well, but it's hard to design even a meaningful prototype when you're still struggling with the notion of your target audience and its needs.
>  
> It would be quite instructive, in other words, to have you enumerate at least some of the ways in which iPython kicks IRB to the curb.   Not in the spirit of having a really entertaining flame war but in the spirit of pointing out some demonstrable, tangible areas in which IRB might improve.  Who knows, someone on this list might be looking for just such a little project and struggling with the first great problem in computer science, namely trying to come up with an idea for something interesting to write (the other two being cache invalidation and naming things), and your bullet list could be just what they are waiting for!
>  
> - Jordan
>  
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