Nathan’s Comments (group member since Apr 29, 2010)

Nathan’s comments from the Software Engineering group.

For anyone looking to purchase the book, it's 40% off through Wednesday, Jan 9 2013 with coupon code NewYear2013 at http://pragprog.com/book/rwdata/seven...

Ruby: Used for Rails in SEIS752 and elsewhere, plus rewrote a toy database utility a while back
Io: Never heard of it
Prolog: Never heard of it
Scala: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Erlang: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Closure: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Haskell: Heard of it, never programmed in it

Though on reflection, most of my "heard of its" may be based on having owned this book for a while but not having read it yet.

If you are an ACM member, the Mythical Man-Month is available as a part of the Safari Books Online selections available at http://learning.acm.org/

Brad wrote: "I think the poll has stabilized to a pretty clear preference, so the July/August selection will be Beautiful Code."

For those who are ACM members, the slice of Safari Books Online (http://pd.acm.org/) that ACM makes available to members currently includes Beautiful Code.

I would have liked to have seen a chapter on Ruby. I'm primarily familiar with it through Ruby on Rails, a web application framework. I'm not sure how popular it is outside of that domain.

It's a dynamic language that emphasizes the programmer over the system, so while the results might not be as efficient, it is fun to program in.

In Ruby, everything is an object, so something like "this is a string".length will return the length of the string.

It's becoming more common to use scripting languages for game development because the rules-aspect of the game ends up being tweaked quite a bit before (and often after) release. The dynamic nature of the scripting language makes this iterative process easier. Aside from the Lua cases, Civilization IV is a popular game that utilizes Python for this purpose.

Apple's recent decision to ban the use "an intermediary translation or compatibility layer" could have some consequences for developers who wish to use Lua to create games on the iPhone OS. Apple is positioning the iPod Touch as a gaming device, and they've been successful enough to convince Nintendo that Apple is the main competition now, so this could have real ramifications for game development in the mobile arena.