Ruby Tuesday
27 November 2013
I had a hard day coding JavaScript (boo!) so I decided to take Rubymotion out for a spin. The $200 plus price-tag with no demo had given me pause, but oh well I thought, in for a penny in for a pound.
Rubymotion's a development toolchain for writing iOS apps in Ruby, rather than in Objective C. The active community was one of the things that enticed me in, there are lots of demos & Github projects. I picked eight at random once I had the compiler, and five of them crashed. Memory errors, deprecated function calls… crash, crash, crash.
I'd read reports of bugs but this is only my first day, and I have 30 to ask for my money back. I'll use as many of those days as I can, I'd like it to work. Ruby like-wise.
Ruby is a dying language. Business is over its dalliance with Ruby. No major startup is lauding their use of Ruby and existing businesses are migrating away or simply writing new applications in a different language.
So says Brian Shirai, author of Rubinius, one of the competing Ruby interpreters. [Link no longer available.]
I don't know that I'd go that far. Ruby's no longer the new hotness, that's true, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of innovative stuff's come out of the Ruby camp, especially in the last decade alongside Rails - Brew, Sass, Haml, Coffeescript… and projects like Rubymotion.
30 days.