Not a good decision, it turned out, out, because when you look for Hpricot, there is not much out [...]]]> While working on a little school project I found that at some point I would have to do some HTML parsing. having heard of why I went, then, to Hpricot page and started working with it.

Not a good decision, it turned out, out, because when you look for Hpricot, there is not much out there i terms of examples, documentation, or simple code to read out about.

Nokogiri, on the other hand, has much many responses and gloogle results, and all of them within a few months, as opposed to those from Hpricot, that are scattered, old and don’t really answer many questions.

As an example, check this conversation from SO:

Pick nokogiri, for at least points 1-4, I don’t know about (5).

And the points are

1. Support & Future enhancements
2. Community & general knowledge base (on the Internet)
3. Comprehensive (i.e proven to parse a wide range of *.*ml pages)
4. Performance
5. Memory Footprint (runtime, not the code-base)

Even mechanize is using Nokogri instead of the more elegant hpricot.

I will continue playing with Hpricot, but at which point will this cost me?

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Here, I am going to do the same.

Part of the problem is that, after [...]]]> Trying to get Ruby and Rails to work in Vista64 turned to be an exercise in masochism: All the wikis, blogs, fora and others re contradicting one another, based on what worked in one system and extrapolating to other situations.

Here, I am going to do the same.

Part of the problem is that, after installing all the dependencies with

there are messages that indicate that as not working:

==== UNSUPPORTED PLATFORM ==================================

The platform ‘i386-mingw32′ is unsupported. Please help the author by
editing the following file to allow your sqlite3 library to be found, and
submitting a patch to qoobaa@gmail.com. Thanks!

C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/sqlite3-0.0.4/lib/sqlite3/driver/ffi/api.rb
===================================================================

What I did was to go to the mentioned api.rb, and check the offending environment

and replaced

with

I followed tips from emson.

So far this works, but I do fully expect more trouble along the way.

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Haskell came to my attention after reading all the reddit posts about it. Time to give it a try.

And then he proceeds to make a case [...]]]> Cedric is pessimistic regarding Ruby and its mainstream acceptance: Why Ruby on Rails won’t become mainstream

Interestingly, they might even be right. But by then, it won’t matter because despite its technical excellence, Ruby on Rails will still be a niche technology that only experts know about.

And then he proceeds to make a case for reasons that have already held back amazingly good concepts, like the BetamaxLISP, Smalltalk and the like.
Oh, I do disagree: the same could have been said of linux, you know, that it is only a thing for a few experts, a niche development.
But both Ruby and RoR have things that the other products lacked when first out: a vocal, convinced and evangelizing community, a low barrier to entry, an amazing product, and a philosophy where the programmers’ ease is at the front. The whole thing is just elegant.
Have you tried using LISP? Expensive, complicated, hard to get – and I am not talking about ten years ago, or twenty, when you had to deal with nonstandard issues (i read it somewhere). I am thinking about right now, where you go to install KPAX and you find that there are no documents, and that your pc won’t work, and frankly, no. Too much time, and your time is worth money.
Now, simply download ruby, gems, and presto: start working.
Or get the Poignant Guide, or The Pickaxe. What is more, there are a lot of developers that, fascinated with the ease of programming with Ruby can actually make a difference in the acceptance of the language, regardless of the difficulty of the concepts or the relatively newness of it.
And, really, Ruby is not that new: it has been around for 10 years, only that it is only recently that we are getting to see some applications and evangelization process going on.

Let’s make an experiment: we know that the cool kids are all trying this now; so, next foo camp, let’s check how many of the invitees get there spouting ruby dogma, and how fast it goes.

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Let’s become evangelists for Ruby and [...]]]> Ruby fast
Justin Gehtlan has some interesting numbers from a ruby app at Some Numbers at Last, with the sweetest conclusion:

Rails can be very fast… On the other hand, I am going to spend more of my time trying to find projects that I can use Rails on.

Let’s become evangelists for Ruby and Rails.

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