
OK, holy crap. This will be like the only non-objective-c Mac programming platform that's officially supported and hooked into Cocoa from the ground up. The future of Mac apps might just be Ruby, dropping down to Objective-C where you need the hardcore number crunching performance.
What's a Ruby?
I have no idea what you're talking about, though I wish I did :(
I guess my point was that unlike the scripting bridge, or the java bridge, MacRuby has all the regular ruby objects descending directly from their NS counterparts. So all ruby strings are descended from NSString, etc... just seemed to me like it went a lot further then RubyCocoa or PyObjC, but I'm not as familiar with PyObjC as with RubyCocoa.
Anyways, I just looked at MacRuby for a few minutes at the start of the day and won't get a change to play around with it until the weekend, so my impressions aren't even half baked.
There's also PyObjC, the python tie-in. I haven't messed with Ruby, but PyObjC was a real PITA to work with, largely because it didn't have the real nice integration with XCode that Objective-C did and because PyObjC programs are structured codewise in a that's totally different from the proper order that Obj-C programmers expect them to be in.
It's also going in the other direction as well. With the enhancements that Apple's made to Obj-C, it's more like a scripting language, e.g. they added garbage collection to Obj-C 2.0 as well as a foreach-ish loop syntax.
In spite of Apple's moves to make Obj-C more like a scripting language, they still haven't included regular expressions in their API. something which astounds me to no end and makes all my scripting friends say "you gotta be kidding me!" When tasked with searching through lots of text for very specific things, it's at that point that non-Obj-C scripting languages provide a definite advantages as a workaround to Apple's stupidity.
Apple introduced the ruby scripting bridge to Leopard and you might have some fun playing with it.
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