[NCLUG] Ruby Fanatics?

[Chad Perrin]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 06:45:28PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Michael Riversong wrote:
> > It's my understanding that there are some Ruby fanatics in
> > Ft. Collins.  Would like to be in the loop for events involving
> > that.
> 
> There are a few Rubyists in the area.  I like programming in Ruby for
> random things that need scripting.  But I don't think I qualify as
> being "fanatical" about it.  I am more of a rethreaded Perl programmer
> who discovered Ruby and enjoy using it.  But unfortunately there
> doesn't seem to be a huge community of Rubyists here.  At least not as
> many as other languages and not as many as elsewhere.

There are many more in Boulder, but they're about 98% Rails-centric
startup people, so I find I do not have much in common with them.  I like
Ruby, but am not the world's biggest fan of Rails.  Basically, the only
use I have for Rails is getting paid work involving Ruby.

. . . because I really like Ruby.


> >
> > Is it possible to program video games with intense character
> > graphics with Ruby?
> 
> Character graphics should definitely be possible.  I don't think I
> would try programming any 3D rendering in Ruby.  I am more of a C
> programming for anything truly hard core.  But I don't see a reason
> not to use Ruby for general programming.

Possible?  Yes.  As Bob mentions, resource-intensive 3D graphics is not
really Ruby's forte, though.  People tend to fall back to C or C++ for
that, and with good reason; performance.

I'm writing a somewhat complex character tracking suite of tools for
writers of fiction and players of (pen and paper) roleplaying games in
Ruby, though.  Well, I'm rewriting it; I already have a version with
command line and Web interfaces, but I'm running into some limitations of
my initial design choices, so I've started over for a new version, which
supports an interactive console-based mode at present.  I expect to have
a fairly complete Web interface set up in a month or so.  If you know
anything about roleplaying games, you probably know about the somewhat
insane levels of complexity that can arise in tracking character data.
Add to that the fact I'm designing the new version to use modules to
support different rulesets, and it should be pretty quickly apparent that
this is well beyond glorified shell scripts -- and Ruby poses no
difficulties.

I'm a pretty mediocre programmer.  If I can do this with Ruby, so should
anyone else be able to do such stuff with Ruby, with minimal difficulty.

PHP, on the other hand . . . that would be hell.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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