Ruby a combination of system and scripting programming language

Many people believe that “rubinius matters to Ruby’s future“. Ruby is still widely used as a scripting language that usually are interpreted, but projects like Rubinus a virtual machine and compiler for Ruby and YARV a new bytecode interpreter are transforming Ruby into a system programming language.

If you are interested in a detailed analyze of system and scripting programming languages, check out this “scripting: higher level programming for the 21st century“. It has some detailed explanations and comparisons, more importantly it predicted the rising of scripting language.

A language like Ruby empowers both of system and scripting programming languages will definitely have a promising future.

Ruby Block and Closure

The most difficult part of Ruby Language for any ruby new comer is block and closure. Those two features are not very common among other modern high level programming languages like PHP or Java. They are used extensively in ruby magics. Here is what I found useful while learning.First, I went through “Chapter 4 Containers, Blocks and Iterators” from book Programming Ruby 2nd Edition, here the first edition free online. I highly recommend you get this book. The 2nd edition covers ruby 1.8, at this time Ruby has released version 1.9. For changes in Ruby 1.9 check out this great blog post at Eigenclass.To help you understand Closure better, here is more examples. More tutorials from DevArticles – Ruby Blocks and Iteration and Ruby Learning . Also, here is an interview with Yukihiro Matsumoto the creator of Ruby about blocks and closures. He talked about the importance of blocks and what makes block a closure. He also noted what is the benefit of real closure and where he got inspiration from

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update 2008-01-14

InfoQ: The state of the Lambda in Ruby 1.9 talked about Ruby Closure and Block in general, also what’s new in Ruby 1.9 for block and closure. 

Rails Migration in PHP Zend Framework

Needless to say Migration is one of the best tools in Rails that make Ruby on Rails shine. If you are a PHP developer, check out this [Zend Framework: Zend_Db_Schema_Manager Component Proposal].

“Zend_Db_Schema_Manager maintains a database schema in a database agnostic format. This ensures that the same change can be applied to multiple databases and all changes can be stored in a version control system. The schema itself can be given in several formats like XML, PHP. Additional input formats could be integrated. “

Since this is still an early stage proposal, so there is no time line on when will this be available or even be accepted into the framework. But it’s always good to give your feedback to the proposal