Why do Puppet and Chef use Ruby? [closed] - ruby

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Closed 9 years ago.
We all know that Puppet and Chef are the superstars of the IT automation area, and they are developed in Ruby (though Chef 11 server was rewritten in Erlang).
In my working environment, a very large group of the operations team uses Python as the primary language to develop operation tools or basic system applications.
I want to find why both Puppet and Chef were written in Ruby? What are the advantages? Ruby supports DSLs well. Can Python do such thing?

From Luke Kanies, Puppet’s author:
I was a sysadmin by trade and had mostly developed in perl, but when I
tried to write the prototype I had in mind, I couldn’t get the class
relationships I wanted in perl. I tried Python, because this was
around 2003 and Python was the next new thing and everyone was saying
how great it is, but I just can’t seem to write in Python at all. A
friend had said he’d heard Ruby was cool, so I gave it a try, and in
four hours I went from never having seen a line of it to having a
working prototype. I haven’t looked back since then, and haven’t
regretted the choice.

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What programming languages are available on MAC for web programming [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.
I am making the conversion from PC to MAC and wanted to know what options do I have to still develop websites. I usually create websites with c# but besides C# what other options do I have on the macintosh?
MAC is even better environment for development (web) than Windows. It is because it is nix. I used PC for years and I feel more comfortable on MAC. For example you can manually set working environment for PHP (appache, mysql) with ease, and you have more control with everything you do. Mac, by default, comes with installed Python, so you can easily create your web working environment. There is also Ruby etc.
Git + Editor(Textmate, Sublime) + Web = Perfect combination.
I would say that Ruby (Ruby on Rail) is pretty common. You still have PHP, Python too.
If you want some example try CodeCademy or CodeSchool

What are the good machine learning and data minning libraries for Ruby or is there any? [closed]

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Closed 10 years ago.
I plan to do some ML programming on Ruby on Rails project and I am searching for any ML framework on Ruby. I searched on Google of course but cannot find any satisfying one so I decide to consult to crowd's wisdom.
I would not say there are any 'good' library for machine learning written in pure ruby since machine learning is fairly computationally expensive. A good library will likely wrap a c interface to a well known library. So you could try and find a good c library and create a ruby wrapper of the library.
An alternative would be to use JRuby and import a java based library. Here is an article about importing weka.
http://rubyforscientificresearch.blogspot.ca/2009/08/accessing-weka-from-jruby.html
There may be application specific libraries for what you are doing using machine learning? If you are trying to do recommendations try the recommendify gem.
Another alternative is to use a webservice. There is the google prediction api which has a ruby client.

What non-trivial Ruby applications exist? [closed]

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Closed 11 years ago.
What publicly available open source Ruby applications (not frameworks) exist apart from web applications?
This question is similar to Ruby off the rails , except that's about anecdotes of what Ruby applications they've created, which aren't necessarily publicly available.
These applications should be non-trivial: ideally multiple committers, with well-designed code to handle the complexity of their task.
One example would be the Metasploit Project.
Background: Asking in response to Framework for non-web Ruby project, where I realised that I haven't seen any examples of Ruby applications that aren't one-person projects.
Take a look at Chef. This Ruby project is becoming the de-facto tool for managing cloud architectures.
Have you seen hackety hack? Non-trivial, but you will find plenty of interesting ideas in the source code if you're adventurous. Being written by _why, it's pretty fanciful.
There are a number of Mac OS X applications written in Ruby-Cocoa (LimeChat is an example; I think Colloquy used to be, though its website implies that that may have changed).
As far as not seeing Ruby projects by more than one person...huh? True, most open-source Ruby development these days seems to be in the Rails world, but within that community there are lots of huge projects with many developers.
You might ask this question on the Ruby mailing list; you'll almost certainly get more good answers.

What can be done with Ruby which can't be done with C# 4.0? [closed]

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Closed 11 years ago.
I just finished reading the Ruby chapter of the book 7 Languages in 7 Weeks. Aside from some syntactic sugar here and I can't really see anything which can't be done with C# with a similar syntax. I do understand both languages are inherently different, but my question relates to its usage rather than design.
Relevant questions make me believe Ruby offers little more than C#:
Why aren't c# programmers drawn to ruby as java programmers are?
Is Ruby's code block same as C#'s lambda expression?
I hardly worked with Ruby and my understanding of the language is still very limited, so perhaps somebody who experimented with both .NET 4.0 and Ruby can answer with concrete examples.
Which tasks require significantly less work with Ruby than C# 4.0?
For those interested, since the question got closed here, I tried again on Programmers.SE, and accepted an answer there.
Both languages are Turing complete, so you can do exactly the same with both of them.
However I think some tasks will require less work in Ruby, and some in C#.

Any good Ruby console application gems out there? [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.
I'm digging around trying to find a good set of tools for creating console applications, as most of the settings I expect to be using Ruby in the coming months won't be webapps, but server-side scripts.
I know of highline, and I do plan on using that for user and possible password prompts, but I know that the Console application world should be chock-full of other gems to assist and/or enrich your plain 'ol command-line apps.
Does anyone have some good suggestions? I'm not exactly sure what I'm really looking for, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were gems in Ruby to help with colorizing, ascii-like art, user-interaction (similar to bash-completion), man-page similar tools (or generators) or just helpers for making the work of creating a richer console app not come across as being so difficult to understand, or plain and cryptic.
Here's some console related gems I've written you may like:
bond - Custom readline autocompletion of methods, arguments and more.
hirb - Framework for formatting ruby objects. Comes with tables, trees, selection menus and a smart pager.
alias - Creates, manages and saves aliases for class methods, instance methods, constants, delegated methods.
My table_print gem lets you see IRB output in easy-to-scan table format. Super simple, lightweight, customizable. http://tableprintgem.com

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