snicknet.net

No, not a girl, the language. I doubt few have not heard of Ruby or Ruby on Rails. I personally had never used Ruby up until about, oh, say Monday. Later this week I will be putting my first Ruby script into production. I’m a little worried not having used Ruby for all that long, but I must say I’m quite impressed by how easy it is to do things in the language.

I was pushed to Ruby after all the other languages I normally use for web scrapping failed as I wrote about on Sunday. Today was initiation day, and my script passed on its first attempt. We had to change one tiny requirement to make the script work appropriately, we’re waiting to hear back if this will inconvenience our client. Hopefully all will turn out well. The script is very snappy and is going to easily replace and hour or two of a skilled workers daily routine making them more productive overall. Today’s change was to compress two files in a ZIP archive for a single file upload. Never having zipped a file in Ruby I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. A quick Google search, one gem installation, and 4 lines of code later, Success! I’m thoroughly impressed by the ease with which most common tasks are completed. It reminds me of what I love about PHP without the ; at the end of every line or the excessive ( )’s. I will definitely have to explore Ruby a bit further to see what else I might be capable of doing with it. Who knows, maybe I just found the language I needed to move some of my stalled projects forward.