Ruby

I am a mathematica hacker for all extents and purposes. Hackers and programmers have two different ideologies: The former, gets things done quickly, but the code is barely reusable; Programmers however, aim for code to be portable and leveraged-on in the bigger picture of things.

Hackers usually tie programmers’ code with duct tape, and make things barely work. Sometimes hackers enter the programming space, if they find themselves reusing certain techniques over and over again… Programmers however, barely enter our space, because they’re too engrained in tidiness. It’s hard relating if you’re out of the space, but the constant conditioning of ‘good code’ makes you OCD, regardless of your personality type. It’s a bit of a weakness if you want quick answers, but a fair strength if you’re working with a *gasp* person.

Anyways, what you’re hacking together, makes you good or evil. The same cannot be said for programmers, because the code they generally build is not purpose specific.

Hackers need glue languages: Able to tie everything together, and value a persons time. These things today come at the expense of taxing a computer heavily. A perfect “glue”, for me, is mathematica. Simply put, it comes with batteries. A huge negative is that these batteries cost money (it’s not open source), so no one uses it. Even through I can input excel files, and output complex graphs with just a couple characters (never mind 'lines’) of code. I cannot, use other people’s code — because there’s none to find.

This is where Ruby comes in, yet-another glue language, but this time people actually use it RubyGems::Thumbs Up::

I figured I’ll write about my journey with this language to solidify my own ideas, but also help the universe a bit with yet-another tutorial on this language.

My IDE is Rubymine: No one uses it, and it costs money. Netbeans and Aptana (Eclipse) are the current internets favorites.