Welcome to the new world of development...
Hi...
when I started developing software it was all about saving memory and processor cycles. Ladies and Gentlemen, this changed dramatically...
I am in the process of learning Ruby. Since I do this in little steps (10 minutes here, 15 minutes there) I do my little adavances. And it has shown me a lot...
I have lacked a good tool so far. I use a simple editor and irb and Ruby for windows. Man, this has shown to me how far I am away from the old days. If you do type everything by hand you really feel the benefit of Intellisense... I force myself through it in the hope to learn more.
On the other hand programming Ruby is like "eating the way your parents never tolerated" (hands in the carrots and stuffing into your mouth dropping half of it...).
You don't care about memory... what is this anyway?? Processor cycles?? You are so far away from this processor that it takes you hours to resolve how this all ends on the iron. It feels like flower-power programming...nice... to good to be true....
On the other hand: It is a natural development in that sense that Moore's law helped us increasing the performance dramatically. What did not increase was the developer's performance. We still use tools developed with memory consumption in mind during a period of time when this used to be an issue. Not anymore...
Today we have to fight with the complexity of multi-core architectures. If I can explore the power within the CPU cores in my reach I can be as wasteful as I want and still be much faster than any conventional application using only one core.
Another good example of this is game development. Boy, did I have respect towards those geniouses behind the Doom-engine those days.
Have a look at https://www.microsoft.com/germany/msdn/coding4fun/xna/default.mspx (sorry, this is the German XNA site ;-) and how one can build a true 3D real time game in no time... the framework will even switch the lights on (when I did my webcast series on DirectX this was something I always did wrong and wondered why there was nothing to see in my scenary...but I know I am not alone with this).
To be very clear: You won't implement a numerical library with Ruby and I doubt that somebody uses a dynamic language on a 4-bit embedded processor today... select your tools wisely. But if things simply go the same way they have gone in the past who knows...
CU
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