Programming/Scripting Languages

[kekeoki]

I want to get my foot in the video game industry, be it as a build engineer with a scripting language like ruby or as a QnA person or something. My real question is if anyone knows where I can find a good Ruby IDE because when I tried using Aptana it wouldn't run because when i tried to debug/run my program it would say unable to find ruby executable. If anyone has any tutorials on getting that started it would be appreciated, i have tons to teach me the language but none for setting it up like what preprocessor stuff i need etc.

FYI I have been coding for almost a year, C++ and a little Java and that sort of thing. any help would be appreciated thanks!

[semaphore]

Is there a reason why you can't just use the CRuby interpreter?

[kekeoki]

i wrote something out in notepad++ and whenever i use the ruby or rubyw applications to open it the cmd promt opens really quickly then shuts

[semaphore]

This sounds like the program finished executing and so the window closes before you get to take a look. If you just want to execute your script, open CMD and navigate to the folder containing it, and then run your script using the ruby executables.

[Cyanotical]

As I understand, companies are having a hard time finding java programmers, and I quote from a headhunter I talked to: "companies will pay a 2nd grader 6 figures as long as they know java"

You may want to focus a bit more on java, It's quickly surpassing a vmware cert for an easy high paying job

[ssambakd]

I'd just like to add that you might wanna "expand your horizon" and take a look at other things in life that you can improve or make a difference with computer science skills. The real world actually has a lot of interesting problems to solve if you know how to look

But then again, if you're dead set into video gaming industry, this might just fall on deaf ears.

One fact i'll leave you with is that the gaming industry has long hours and a lot of competition/stress. It's not like playing a game lol

[a21fa7c67f26f6d49a20c2c51]

It's not clear what platform you're using from the original post: Aptana is cross platform.

The ruby community these days has by-and-large migrated to Mac OS X as the preferred development platform. I guess that makes sense to some extent: programmers that care to choose a "beautiful language" are likely to want an OS and hardware with similar values. Windows, even with cygwin is still a pretty crumby UNIX/UNIX-like platform so Mac OS X kinda wins by default.

In general ruby isn't written in a full IDE so much as a powerful text editor and a couple of console windows. Having written ruby applications professionally in the past, it doesn't really feel like an IDE is required. It doesn't feel hobbled the way Java without Eclipse or C# without VisualStudio does.

Among mac users you'll find the popular text editors are:

• BBEdit: an editor as old as the mac platform -- It has basic syntax highlighting some macroing and is generally considered the most mac-like.

• Textmate: It has a Windows clone called "Reditor" which is compatible with the bundles but ultimately isn't as polished or feature complete. As much as I'm a fan of textmate, it's expensive and feels largely abandoned. It's starting to show it's age. The main reason I cling to this one is that it's readily extensible and many of the features in it are written in ruby.

•*MacVIM: Just a macifified version of the venerable VIM. VIM is an editor with a steep learning curve (like Ouru in classic or Heroic Rag/Lich King more recently) but once you've mastered it, you can basically settle on it forever. It's macroing/snippeting/editing features are pretty much unrivalled (though text mate comes close). One of the nice things about VIM is it'll run on any platform.

• XCode with Macruby is viable, for graphical applications. It's not exactly a pretty solution but it's getting better over time. Sadly the last public release xcode 4.2 of broke the creation of graphical apps (it's fixed in the next update though) so it's a bit obnoxious. Because Macruby runs though LLVM you do get some of the "new hotness" there but it's not nearly as nice as when you're using Objective C.

None of these have "really cool" features like refactoring, integrated debuggers, etc. There isn't much of a push for that among rubyists. It seems like the trend is towards rubydebug in a console window + good text editor.

Because you mentioned setting up build scripts: have you looked at rake? That's more-or-less the de-facto standard for build scripts/automation in ruby. It seems like any good text editor with a ruby/rake sytanx highlighting would be sufficient for that task. I've used it successfully to handle management of server clusters (compute servers in a render farm, web servers for a hosting firm) for managing middle-complexity builds (a BSD-distribution for embedded devices), and of course for it's most popular role handling web-applications. It's really a great tool all around. During all of that time I've never wanted for anything more powerful than Textmate + Terminal (or Emacs, if that's your thing).

[skidmarksteve]

You may want to focus a bit more on java, It's quickly surpassing a vmware cert for an easy high paying job

really need to do some more stuff in java... hmm this weekends free...

vmware? i use that here at home... man i am so not getting payed enough...

[kekeoki]

Yeah my school wont teach me java till my 3rd year of programming, i'm starting to do that on my own. I'm sort of new to the cmd console how do I use it to navigate and run my ruby script? Also i'm not dead set on the game industry, ts just that blizzard is a 10 min drive and Riots like 30 minutes away. I love blizzard but i think riot would be more fun to work at right now and they are hiring like crazy. Thanks for the help though guys.

---------- Post added 2011-08-30 at 01:58 PM ----------

I'd just like to add that you might wanna "expand your horizon" and take a look at other things in life that you can improve or make a difference with computer science skills. The real world actually has a lot of interesting problems to solve if you know how to look

But then again, if you're dead set into video gaming industry, this might just fall on deaf ears.

One fact i'll leave you with is that the gaming industry has long hours and a lot of competition/stress. It's not like playing a game lol

Just another thought, Yeah I know that its not nearly as fun as gaming. But I have done a little bit in terms of making games and I love the feeling of building stuff with code, and I have wanted to make video games for 14 years lol. It's not a walk in the park and I am willing to do other things, gaming is just something I know very well.

[a21fa7c67f26f6d49a20c2c51]

Yeah my school wont teach me java till my 3rd year of programming, i'm starting to do that on my own. I'm sort of new to the cmd console how do I use it to navigate and run my ruby script?

That's the basic idea. Suppose you have your project saved in /users/coolguy/mygame as main.rb
You'd have a terminal window open in that directory (new terminal window: cd /users/coolguy/mygame). On a UNIX-like platform (mac os x, linux, bsd) you'd want to set the script to executable (chmod +x ./main.rb) once, and then you can run it as often as you like with ./main.rb (or call the interpreter and pass the file: ruby main.rb). There's sometimes value in playing with modules in IRB too, but that's a topic worthy of it's own thread on a ruby-coding website.

I think on windows your only option is to call the interpreter directly (ruby main.rb) but I'm not positive on that.

For debugging (breakpointing and all that good stuff) you'd run it via rdebug instead: rdebug main.rb

Most modern text editors will allow you to set a key-bind to almost anything including shell scripts. I have CMD+R set to run my current file in a new terminal window and CMD+Shift+D set to run it with the debugger. You might want to configure other bindings (ie: i have CMD+Shift+R to run the "build clean" script for any more complicated project, that way your can be sure external resources get compiled, databases get updated, etc. without needing to do all that stuff manually. A good text editor will free you from the legwork of using separate editors, debuggers, logging consoles, etc.

[Drunkenvalley]

Um...

Programming is not just knowing syntax. We jump rabbits with chainsaws while on a boat. Perfectly fine syntax-wise, but absolute gibberish otherwise. More important than knowing syntax is knowing how to apply them to create a predictable and safe outcome.