Toby's journal

This is a rather geeky rant, about Ruby. You may want to skip over it.

I can fully understand the being sick of Perl; some days it really gets me down. I just don't see what the "big deal" is with Ruby, which comes across to me more as a novelty than genuinely useful (like so many Perl modules :) ).

I don't really understand their thoughts behind trying to put every feature they can think of in each class.. Case in point, the string class: http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ref_c_string.html

How did they pick that set of operations you can perform?
What on earth is the squeeze method useful for?
Why would you use the replace method and not just some kind of assignment or copy operator?
Why include something like crypt, but not other hashing functions? Come on, lets introduce the entire gamut of SHA-related functions too :) Why not some actual two-way cryptographic functions as while we're there as well?

I guess the point I'm making is that it feels like their design philosophy is not so much feature-creep, as feature-mad-rush.

But some people seem to like it, so maybe I should just go back to coding in assembly or something.

Some of you might have noticed that the BBC is running a distributed-computing thing for Climate change predictions.

You might be interested to know that they are using the open-source BOINC project to handle it, so you can run this stuff on loads of operating systems. Gentoo has BOINC in Portage as sci-misc/boinc. The UNIX versions have a headless server mode with remote GUI support, which is nice.

I've updated Rate My Sanity!!1! to v0.03.
When everyone hit the site at once yesterday, a concurrency bug showed up and probably caused a few of you to get long loading times, blank pages, and missing pictures.
That should be fixed now.

The randomness of the Random function still sucks though.

[Edit@17:50: Randomness improved.]