Live data from Hacker News

RubyMotion - Ruby for iOS

rubymotion.com

181–190 of 250 posts

Re: RubyMotion - Ruby for iOS

#181

I love writing Ruby code, but today I'm finally at a point where I also feel happy and productive with Objective-C. What made my eyes bulge is this: http://www.rubymotion.com/developer-center/guides/project-ma... No XCode. Instead of obscure and impenetrable project files, a convention over configuration Rakefile. Clean and Ruby-like workflows and repositories. While you can certainly configure an Xcode workspace to…

Which makes me wonder.. is it possible to rig up such an environment for standard Objective C iOS app development? It could be huge.

Re: RubyMotion - Ruby for iOS

#182
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'm part of the mostly-silent majority of polyglot programmers that choose the best language for the job and have grown increasingly weary of Rubyists wheel invention and focus on rock star programming and rock star rants. It's the only community that I find socially insufferable, and while an unpopular opinion here, I don't relish the notion of Rubyist culture. Culture aside, simply technologically, Ruby h…

Following up to note that: - Despite the opinion clearly being unpopular here, I stand by it: the ruby community is toxic-at-best, and totally technogically uninteresting. Individual Ruby developers may be very nice people, but that doesn't make the technology any more notable or novel, and doesn't change the general tenor of the Ruby community, which seems to be driven by larger than life personalities and a general…

> general lack of solid applied computer science

Programming is becoming a huge part of everyone's lives. Languages that ease the learning of CS and lower the barriers to entry are very welcome. And some of them also happen to be great business tools.

Re: RubyMotion - Ruby for iOS

#183

I've played around with what seems like ever alternative framework under the sun (Titanium, Rhodes, PhoneGap, MonoTouch, Corona) and have been pretty frustrated with how clunky they usually feel. However with everything its claiming and the decent price point I'm toying with purchasing site unseen...just wish I could try it for a few hours first.

MacRuby is probably a decent place to start. While it won't mirror a true RubyMotion environment, it should be close enough to get a feel for what you're in for.

Re: RubyMotion - Ruby for iOS

#184
post #98
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goodness - what a hateful, stereotyping, and narrow-minded comment. I'm enjoy ruby and spend a lot of time writing it, but would never pass judgement like this on anyone who uses another language. I've never interacted with anyone writing in any language that has an attitude like this - let's hope that you are an edge case...

Honestly, I'm part of the mostly-silent majority of polyglot programmers that choose the best language for the job and have grown increasingly weary of Rubyists wheel invention and focus on rock star programming and rock star rants. It's the only community that I find socially insufferable, and while an unpopular opinion here, I don't relish the notion of Rubyist culture. Culture aside, simply technologically, Ruby h…

"have grown increasingly weary of [..] rock star rants"

That's funny, because to me it seems you've taken a few of them at their word about what "the Ruby community" is like (or even the existence of a singular one in the first place).

Re: RubyMotion - Ruby for iOS

#185
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'm part of the mostly-silent majority of polyglot programmers that choose the best language for the job and have grown increasingly weary of Rubyists wheel invention and focus on rock star programming and rock star rants. It's the only community that I find socially insufferable, and while an unpopular opinion here, I don't relish the notion of Rubyist culture. Culture aside, simply technologically, Ruby h…

Following up to note that: - Despite the opinion clearly being unpopular here, I stand by it: the ruby community is toxic-at-best, and totally technogically uninteresting. Individual Ruby developers may be very nice people, but that doesn't make the technology any more notable or novel, and doesn't change the general tenor of the Ruby community, which seems to be driven by larger than life personalities and a general…

I thought this rhetorical style sounded familiar. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3844851

I don't think many here are arguing that Ruby is particularly interesting technology-wise. Amongst languages, well, it isn't particularly. But the baseless FUD about the "culture" or the "community" is unnecessary.

Re: RubyMotion - Ruby for iOS

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll find the difference between working with Cocoa APIs in Obj-C vs Ruby is that it's much easier in Ruby to turn what you've learned into a simple, boiled-down, easier to digest set of helper methods/objects/modules. For example, in using the RubyMotion beta, after I understood the UIView animation flow, I created a helper method using "yield" to do the actual animation. If I were working in Obj-C, it wou…

Isn't that really the difference between something like: def animate UIView.begin_animation yield UIView.commit_animation end animate do # Do something end and: void animate(void (^block)(void)) { [UIView beginAnimation]; block(); [UIView commitAnimation]; } animate(^ { // Do something }); Which to my eye are pretty much exactly the same. In fact, UIView already provides a similar method built into the API. Anyway, I…

One of the weirdest, but oft repeated, "criticisms" I hear of Ruby is how much "weird punctuation" it uses. A groundless claim compared to most other languages, though, as this snippet illustrates.

Re: RubyMotion - Ruby for iOS

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may have missed something but API calls looks like a regular Ruby call with a hash and since all [] are dropped it's systematically shorter (not even counting the fact that you don't have .h/.m, declaration/implementation, it's not just a matter of API calls). i.e. [obj method: param second: param2]; vs obj.method(param, second: param2) which is exactly two characters shorter in ruby. And what would be the point of…

I was looking at the example and their are a fair number of commas. If you pass 3 selectors it is longer. UIColor.colorWithRed(red/100.0, green:green/100.0, blue:blue/100.0, alpha:1.0) vs [UIColor colorWithRed:red/100.0 green:green/100.0 blue:blue/100.0 alpha:1.0]; >And what would be the point of having something that looks like Objective-C? Because the name of the function is not colorWithRed(), it is colorWithRed:b…

[deleted]

Re: RubyMotion - Ruby for iOS

#188
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Object cycles, when two or more objects refer to each other, are currently not handled by the runtime, but will be in future releases." So, basically, you're stuck with retain cycles right now. My bet is that they implement a way of marking weak references rather than becoming more intelligent than ARC.

I wonder how big a deal this will be. Relying on GC feels like it goes hand in hand with dynamic languages. I'm used to not having to worry about cycles. Of course, I guess I'm use to not having to worry too much about memory, either ... Weak references aren't a panacea. It's not that uncommon to have cycles where all edges are equally strong. Any social graph ... I use use counts to collect those cycles. ARC doesn't…

You can still use counts — you just can't use Foundation's retain count.

And I think CoreData is the answer to problems like a social graph. It does its own specialized memory management. But you're right, it's awkward to have to think about it.

Re: RubyMotion - Ruby for iOS

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said this in another reply, but I'll reiterate here. It's not the lack of Objective-C that is the big deal here. Afterall you are still interfacing with cocoa, and are stuck with a lot of the verbosity in doing that. The real key to this is the REPL and interactivity between coding and the running app. Being able to edit bits of functionality and structure in the running app, and immediately see the results is AWES…

I don't know Ruby. Therefore, by my own admission, this comes out of complete ignorance. I am currently working on a project that uses a genetic solver and some fairly complex state machines driven by fairly involved databases. I can't possibly see how something like this could be made to be interactive in terms of the development process. Generally speaking you are writing a lot of code before you get to compile and…

http://vimeo.com/36579366

Re: RubyMotion - Ruby for iOS

#190
post #53

I don't see the point of this. Objective-C is not hard to learn, and with ARC, blocks, the new literals for NSArray and NSDictionary, etc, Objective-C has actually become pleasant to write IMO. The example RubyMotion code also doesn't look very nice either. The problem with Rubyists (being one for the past 6 years I feel qualified to say this) is in general they want to use Ruby for everything. It's not always the be…

> Rubyists in general want to use Ruby for everything. Well… why not? This is a relatively objective statement; the problem with ruby tends to be the crappy interpreter we're forced to suffer through - not the language itself. The Ruby language, in my biased opinion, as far as OO-functional languages go is pure awesome. My initial reaction was: "A Ruby to Obj-C ABI compiler? Fuck no, what is wrong with you." Upon lea…

I like ruby but please, do not call it a functional language. Its not even remotely close.
Post reply on HN