TheSpicyChicken

Ruby Resources

Posted April 17th, 2009 by Nick

In the Biomedical Informatics department here at Stanford we do a lot of coding and scripting.  Since our emphasis is on usefulness and implementation speed we rely heavily on high level programming languages.

The “old-school” informaticists have relied on Perl (yes, Perl) to develop these scripts.  But in the modern ages where languages like Python and Ruby are available to us, we don’t need to be knee deep in archaic idioms and clunky syntax.  I have been relying on Python for years now.  My implementation speed has increased substationally, I have less headaches, and life is generally better.

It turns out, however, that many of my colleagues and peers have a great appreciation for Ruby, which seems to be gaining a lot of traction lately.  As a self-named agile software developer I feel it would hypocratic if I didn’t pick up Ruby.  Afterall I need to have as many tools in my box as possible and learning Ruby will only make me a better informaticist.

My first impressions for Ruby have been very positive.  It is a truly object oriented language in ways that Python falls short.  Also I just love the dual implementation of most of the methods for when you want to modify the instance or you would rather return it.  For example, say we have a list:

The method call with the exclamation point at the end mutates the instance ‘list’ while without it, it will return a new list.  This is one of my biggest griefs with Python.  It causes code that should only take one like, take three. (Not to mention just trying to remember which way the method works)

Python

Ruby

You just can’t argue with that.  Also I found this great resource for Ruby.  If you are an experienced programmer (especially if you are familiar with high level languages) this page basically teaches you everything you need to know about Ruby to get started.