Ruby

Well, I couldn't really start a blog without writing a small article about this fantastic programming language, Ruby. It all started when a friend of mine posted a message about the Tioga plotting library.

He said that this library was producing great plots (he saw directly plots made by its creator, Bill Paxton). When I saw this video, I was sincerely convinced !

So then, as the library was only for the Ruby programming language, I started immediately to learn Ruby, using the Pragmatic Programmer's Programming Ruby. I found it an extremely enjoyable experience. Within an hour, I had made my first Ruby script using Tioga. Before the end of the day, I was sending my first bug report to Bill. The following day, I had already started to work on a (very poor at that time) first version of ctioga...

I've gone on working with Ruby ever since... I wrote no less than 9000 lines of code only in the SciYAG project on Rubyforge, not mentioning other projects using Ruby and the countless scripts I have written for my everyday science... Ruby is extremely comfortable to program with. A pure delight !