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Brenda
05-30-2013, 09:53 AM
In Peter Cooper's book Ruby Intermediate to Professional it has a chapter on ruby's history. Around 1997 was when the official american documentation was out. What exactly is Gemstone Coded in? What's Gemstone's coding history? Simu's Github is full of Ruby and they were hiring a Rails Dev a while back... So is everything done in Ruby now? a bit confused because i could have sworn they were converting over to Ruby in '94 which would make them one of the first few american companies to embrace the language and maybe even contribute to the documentation. Which is pretty cool.
BriarFox
05-30-2013, 10:19 AM
They say they code in GSL (GemStone Language), a propriety coding language. I have no idea what it's based on, though.
Brenda
05-30-2013, 10:29 AM
ahhh, I wonder if it's completely object oriented but it's probably not... Smalltalk? which is Object Oriented and started in the 70's... which makes complete sense because you can develop ruby on top of that concept. right?

http://www.laputan.org/pub/sag/GPG.PDF

the guide is from 1996 so that falls in line with what I remember from highschool. but it's owned by VMWare http://gemstone.com/products/gemstone

but it would fit perfectly for the game since it's solves scaling issues that were being faced in the 90's.... when we would lag out at 1200 population...
alkaloids
05-30-2013, 12:27 PM
Yeah the fact that lich is written in ruby has nothing to do with the language gemstone's built in. Which I have also heard is GSL (and truly terrible) but have no idea from where it may come. I don't think it's something as sexy as smalltalk, though.

I'd bet that all the ruby/rails stuff has a LOT more to do with their recent iOS stuff and NOTHING to do with GS4.
Methais
05-30-2013, 05:05 PM
Isn't GSL C++ based?
Androidpk
05-30-2013, 05:08 PM
Isn't GSL C++ based?

Pascal.
Rayzinbread
05-30-2013, 05:54 PM
Pascal.

Fortran :nutty:
Warriorbird
05-30-2013, 06:43 PM
Isn't GSL C++ based?

C, I believe, but close.
Ardwen
05-30-2013, 06:51 PM
lies, its clearly written in basic
Nattor
05-30-2013, 07:32 PM
lies, its clearly written in basic

I would say it was written on a napkin.
m444w
05-30-2013, 07:38 PM
Cobol
spork
05-30-2013, 08:46 PM
Logo
Ardwen
05-30-2013, 09:03 PM
Hey the most interesting religions began on napkins ya know!
Brenda
05-30-2013, 09:08 PM
Yeah the fact that lich is written in ruby has nothing to do with the language gemstone's built in. Which I have also heard is GSL (and truly terrible) but have no idea from where it may come. I don't think it's something as sexy as smalltalk, though.

I'd bet that all the ruby/rails stuff has a LOT more to do with their recent iOS stuff and NOTHING to do with GS4.

ok well that makes sense. lol, you think smalltalk is sexy eh? I should take a look at it.

the RoR stuff makes sense now that they use it for their IOS stuff.

Thanks!
Drew
05-30-2013, 10:38 PM
Python (oh wait that would be good).
BigWorm
05-30-2013, 11:03 PM
The Ruby stuff is mostly from their Facebook game, Fantasy University. They wrote that in Ruby on Rails but for some reason hosted it on Windows, which is pretty clownpants IMHO. I interviewed a former Simu employee for a Ruby position so I got a pretty good idea of the technologies they used. I wouldn't exactly say that their GitHub page is "full" of Ruby, since they only have forks of other projects and zero original Ruby code.
BigWorm
05-30-2013, 11:09 PM
The technically relevant parts of GemStone are written in C, run on some flavor of Unix, and use Oracle for persistence. It is easy to make fun of the ancient code today, but I will give Whatley credit for engineering a system in the early 90s that handled that many persistent, concurrent connections with reasonable latency.
BigWorm
05-30-2013, 11:13 PM
Also they definitely didn't convert to Ruby in 1994 since Ruby wasn't publicly released until 1995 and got basically zero attention outside of Japan until 2000 when Dave Thomas released the "Pickaxe" book.
alkaloids
05-30-2013, 11:55 PM
They wrote that in Ruby on Rails but for some reason hosted it on Windows, which is pretty clownpants IMHO. I interviewed a former Simu employee for a Ruby position so I got a pretty good idea of the technologies they used. I wouldn't exactly say that their GitHub page is "full" of Ruby, since they only have forks of other projects and zero original Ruby code.

+1 Awesome.
Kaldonis
05-31-2013, 04:37 AM
It's C by the way, and it's the Interactive Fiction Engine. But GMs don't code in C AFAIK, they code for the interpreter of the Gemstone Scripting Language, which people mentioned.

Google and Wikipedia are your friends: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simutronics
Kaldonis
05-31-2013, 04:45 AM
As far Ruby and Lich goes, well the main page (http://lichproject.sourceforge.net/) sums it up:


Why Ruby and not (Python/Perl/Java/etc.)?

In the interest of saving time, I can sum it up by saying: I used Ruby because it's a personal preference of mine and the interpreter requires very little modification to function fully in an embedded environment.

But then again, having a fair amount of experience at least with bash scripting and C++, Ruby is awesome, and perl and python can both blow me. If I say anything bad about Java one of my good friends is going to get really angry with me, but I can say I play on Warlock and you can make your scripts in Java if you want (not JavaScript though), and there are a fair number of them available on the Warlock forums, etc.

I ordered David Flanagan's Ruby text before I knew about lich (interestingly, he also has the best book on Java), so one of these days I'm going to actually learn Ruby instead of writing hacky garbage; no wait, I always write hacked code, nevermind.