Leonard Richardson on Ruby Libraries
Posted by Daniel Butler Mon, 11 Sep 2006 22:53:00 GMT
Pat Eyler has a short interview with the author of Ruby Cookbook, Leonard Richardson, who touches on the ability of great Ruby libraries which change the way you think about the problems of programming.
Leonard: I’m looking forward to more libraries that use Ruby’s idioms to radically simplify entire domains. I think this is where dynamic languages like Ruby and Python show their power: Rails, ActiveRecord, ActiveResource, gserver, DRb, Starfish, Twisted, PyGame, etc. These libraries tackle a problem that’s been around for years, and succeed by hiding a huge amount of the work and/or changing the way you think about the problem.
Leonard even lists his top 5 libraries in Ruby, including mine, Hpricot:
Leonard: Hard to pick just five, but I’ll showcase some lesser-known libraries that I think deserve attention:
- hpricot, by _why, which makes me think I should just pack up Rubyful Soup.
- Starfish, a really simple distributed programming library that Lucas wrote.
- char-encodings deserves more attention. By which I mean, people should work on it as a way to improve Ruby’s internationalization support, and yet I shouldn’t have to do any work on it.
- Ferret is a Ruby port of Lucene, the best Java library ever. It lets you do full-text search on structured data.
- Finally, ActiveResource isn’t a real library yet, and everybody knows about it, but it’s going to be awesome.
Off Topic: This is just a quick note to invite you to register at RubyCorner.com, a meeting place for people interested in the Ruby Programming Language or any of the related technologies.