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by James Britt.
Original Post: The Art of Computational Science, with Ruby
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The Kali project is directed toward the construction of a laboratory for dense stellar systems, such as star clusters, star forming regions, and galactic nuclei containing one or more massive black holes. The presentation is centered around dialogues between two astrophysicists, Alice and Bob, who are in the process of constructing the Kali code from scratch.
We have decided to present our initial codes in the Ruby language, rather than the more traditional choices of Fortran, C, or C++. Ruby is a fully object-oriented, flexible and extremely powerful scripting language. Just like assembly language is far more expressive than machine language, and Fortran or C or C++ are in turn far more expressive than assembly languages, Ruby is an example of a new generation of languages that occupies yet one level higher in the hierarchy of shifting the burden of programming from the programmer to the compiler — or in Ruby’s case, to the interpreter.
Within a few weeks of working with Ruby, we already became convinced of its superiority for our purpose of developing a state-of-the-art computer code for dense stellar system, with sufficient flexibility to allow us to set up a framework for connecting codes old and new, from ancient legacy codes to new products written in a variety of languages. Among the many attractive features of Ruby, it was especially its practical ease of allowing rapid prototyping that appealed to us most.
Follow along with Alice and Bob as they learn Ruby and explore the universe,
Thanks go to Horst Duchene for mentioning this in ruby-talk
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