Well I havent been about much lately and I also havent done any programming whatsoever in the last couple months. However I think the initial discussion was about the viability of programming a MUD in a side-effect free environment not in something like lisp/scheme/ML etc. I asked the question because I was curious if it would be feasible to do in theory and how it might possibily be done (since at the time I was I think debating between implementing a side-effect free compilation system and one which was closer to an "impure" functional language.
Building a mud server (from the ground up) of any sort obviously is quite involved. I guess people often devote years of time to doing this since these sorts of projects often are never really complete and unfortunately the number of half finished server/libraries and codebases is quite high (especially since it's a hobby for most people and sometimes for various reasons including the one's DH pointed out they often lose interest).
I remember reading an introductory book to Ruby at some point and tried messing around a bit- is it a good language(compared to things like Self/Smalltalk/Lisp/Scheme etc)? What makes it particularly good?
I remember reading an introductory book to Ruby at some point and tried messing around a bit- is it a good language(compared to things like Self/Smalltalk/Lisp/Scheme etc)? What makes it particularly good?
Personally I think Ruby does just about everything right for a high level language. It has its flaws, but for what it aims to accomplish it does it well. I've experienced a lot of languages over the years and it's the first one that has ever grabbed me like it has. :P
I remember reading an introductory book to Ruby at some point and tried messing around a bit- is it a good language(compared to things like Self/Smalltalk/Lisp/Scheme etc)? What makes it particularly good?
Personally I think Ruby does just about everything right for a high level language. [snip]
… apart from proper multithreading, an almost must :(
of course, Groovy [edit, and JRuby] does this very well, being a jvm based language :D
Actually the newest version of Ruby has great improvement on preformance and threading. Check it out. :)
The newest Ruby does not have any real improvement on threading, to be honest. It uses native threads but runs them all under one interpreter-wide lock, meaning that all you're getting is greatly increased threading overhead with almost none of the efficiency advantages (it does offer some C API advantages, though). I don't personally actually _like_ threading, and I strongly support the use of a multi-process model anyway, as its safer, more flexible, and more resilient. That said, if you're hoping to get massive scalability improvements out of threaded Ruby apps on a multi-core/multi-CPU box, you're out of luck. That's pretty much the story for all of the popular interpreted "scripting" languages, as threading is very hard to do safely.
The rest of the Ruby VM updates are indeed quite nice and offer a powerful boost to the language's performance, which is long overdue given how damn slow Ruby used to be, even compared to other interpreted languages. 1.9.1 is a fantastic thing for Ruby users. :)
Actually the newest version of Ruby has great improvement on preformance and threading. Check it out. :)
The newest Ruby does not have any real improvement on threading, to be honest. It uses native threads but runs them all under one interpreter-wide lock, meaning that all you're getting is greatly increased threading overhead with almost none of the efficiency advantages (it does offer some C API advantages, though). I don't personally actually _like_ threading, and I strongly support the use of a multi-process model anyway, as its safer, more flexible, and more resilient. That said, if you're hoping to get massive scalability improvements out of threaded Ruby apps on a multi-core/multi-CPU box, you're out of luck. That's pretty much the story for all of the popular interpreted "scripting" languages, as threading is very hard to do safely.
The rest of the Ruby VM updates are indeed quite nice and offer a powerful boost to the language's performance, which is long overdue given how damn slow Ruby used to be, even compared to other interpreted languages. 1.9.1 is a fantastic thing for Ruby users. :)
I never saw Star Wars, but he does look like Blago.