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Flickr? Ruby Hardly Knows 'Er

Tom — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:50:25 -0700

To borrow a phrase from the execrable band Linkin Park, I'm breaking the habit... tonight! Or I was planning to, anyway. The habit in question? Perl.

I was powerless even as it strengthened its hold on me. It's not that I love the syntax — different operators for strings and scalars? A vast collection of frequently-unintuitive file test flags? No thanks. And the procedure for passing parameters to functions is frankly inexcusable.

But it's installed everywhere, and it's got bindings for everything. Yes, it's slow and unglamorous, but Perl reliably gets the job done.

Still, the cool kids were leaving it behind just as I was discovering the full, terrifying power of a scripting language and a well-stocked package manager. I tried to follow those cool kids, but a flirtation with Python went nowhere. I hated tying whitespace to logic, and when I realized how cumbersome its regex syntax was I threw in the towel.

So now I'm giving Ruby a shot, and I'm cautiously optimistic. I worked through the downright-awesome Try Ruby interactive tutorial and liked what I saw. Getting the language installed on my OS X and Linux machines was a snap, and Gems broke in ways that didn't seem outrageously worse than CPAN. Still, tonight hasn't been encouraging.

How can you have a scripting language with Flickr API bindings that are this bad? Of the three Ruby projects that claim to talk to Flickr, one is a partial implementation that is now outdated and broken; another got folded into a larger project that's never actually released anything; and the third is completely undocumented and doesn't work unless you authenticate with Flickr — a step that's complex and should be completely unnecessary for many operations.

All I was trying to do was script up a quick toy based on the Metapixel project. With Perl (or the excellent phpFlickr) this would've taken me all of 30 minutes. With Ruby I ended up throwing in the towel.

I'm not giving up. Plenty of people smarter than me love the language, and I really would like to use something sexier (or at least less awkward) than Perl for gluing the internet together. But I find it more than a little amazing that a language can have a contributed package for programmatically generating DOOM levels but not have a decent way to talk to the web's premiere photosharing site.

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Flickr? Ruby Hardly Knows 'Er