Script-fu

Not terribly long ago, I was a self-proclaimed scripting hater. "Oh sure," I said, "You can do some neat stuff in script-land with your not-real languages and your dynamic types. But wow, my C++ can do all of that and uber-more!" Yeah. So it's time to fess up and admit that I might have, ever so slightly, been somewhat mistaken on some 'a that.

I've had this completely irrational thing for Ruby for, oh, about a year now which mostly manifested itself as not doing Ruby. This (irrational thing for Ruby) is mostly the fault of the blogosphere, notably one Steve Yegge who, despite often being somewhat long winded with a propensity for ten cent words and compilers, is also quite often terribly amusing and a lot of the time spot on. He's got loads of stuff trumpeting the awesome that is Ruby. So I bought a book and read some online tutorials and then got a new job and moved cross country and got tied up in godawful amounts of stuff that's not ruby and wow is that a pretty laptop I should totally get one of those while not doing Ruby.

I used to know perl in much the same way that most people who knew (past tense) perl once did. That is to say, I have absolutely no ability to do perl now because a) it's very obtuse, b) it looks like line noise, and c) it's so unbelievably obtuse that sane human beings flee in terror when confronted with it. Have I mentioned its obtusitude?* Some have described Ruby as "perl with the suck removed" and as I mentioned before, I have a thing for Ruby.

<yet another entry for the worst segue ever category>

I'm now in charge of making load times not suck on my current project. I'd built a couple tools to build giant archive files and to parse in-game spew to do various things that are reasonable and useful toward that goal. I'd built them in C++. This in and of itself is not odd since by and large, I'm a C++ programmer. What I did notice is how godawful difficult seemingly simple things are in C++. This also is not odd since by and large, I'd been noticing that on and off for the last, say, decade. So moving from "hey, I think I can fix our load times" to "holy sweet moby jebus, I have to fix our load times!" I decided that I needed better tools.

Enter Ruby, stage left.

So I used it in a real "have to get this crap working right now kind of situation...and it was good.

So now I gotta take back some of the mean things I said about scripting languages and the people who promote them. Uncle already. I may have been a bit hasty with all of that. Ruby has made the otherwise unbelievably daunting data mangling tasks I've got slightly less unbelievably daunting because now at my very fingertips I have the power to mangle data like never before! Data the world around, tremble before my gemstone inspired might!

I'll save some gory details and horribly contrived examples from Teh Real World(TM) for a later date. So, if you're like me and only really ever looked at your primary statically-typed language for solving all manner of problems, you might go and pick up a scripting language just cause. It might save you some unbelievably daunting.

*obtusitude is not a real word. I made that up, honest.