Thursday, May 11, 2006

Why Java pales in comparison to Ruby

Ruby stands out in comparison with Java in a lot of ways. Its dynamic nature provides for a lot of interesting ways to look at programming. For someone coming in from the java world, the nice hacks that you can never do using java include

  1. Ability to Intercept messages (aka method calls) to Objects using callbacks
  2. Define a class instance for each object. We can change class defnitions associated with one instance of an object ! You can just imagine what u can do with that.
  3. Dynamic Typing - any object that supports a certain message can be used. So no messing around with casts. Code becomes more cleaner and shorter.
  4. Dynamically extend funtionality of any class meaning no class is sealed/final and we can define methods in Object class itself and all objects across can see the new method immediately.
  5. Dynamically create/remove methods/classes on the fly.
  6. Support some forms of functional programming
Anyways this list is not complete or comprehensive. It just contains a list that springs to my mind immediately.

Java purists(lovers ?) can argue that barring the language constructs things like VM optimization, non-green threads, extensive libraries that just about do anything would take a lot of time to manifest in Ruby. Both have their merits and de-merits. But for something that was built by someone in their spare time and with no big corp support (likes of Sun, IBM and Oracle) Ruby sure has come a looooong way.

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I realized that you have deleted a blog entry that something on performance tuning using in memory DB, why has it been deleted? It was interesting on how you tuned it.

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