Using the right tool for the job

Having developed software for quite a few years now, we won't discuss how long since I don't want to date myself :-), it is very easy to stick with a language you use frequently. When a problem arises, you immediately think, "how would I solve that in C++ or Java?". This seems perfectly reasonable given you know the language well and should be able to put something together pretty quick.

Just the other day I found myself in such a situation, I needed to pull apart a binary file to ensure it was being generated correctly. The code that produced the file was in java, however it was a small part of a much bigger system and thus was not easily reused for my purposes. Sitting in my chair I'm thinking how I can quickly put something together that will output the contents of the file and maybe do a little validation in the process. Using C or C++ would not be to bad but require the setup of a VC++ project, generate a main(), write some file code, etc, etc, etc. Nothing hard here, just tedious. Java was no better, I would have to create many of the same things required by C++.

It was about this point that a thought came to me, why not use Ruby? A little Ruby script could pull the file apart easily enough and there would be no need for a main and the file code would be really simple. Only problem, although I've used Ruby for a few things I'm still learning alot about the language so it would no doubt be quite a bit slower to write an app in Ruby than it would be with Java or C++ right? Well, Ruby it is, after all, this adds a little variety into my development life!

So first things first, how to read binary data from a file using Ruby? A quick web search outlined how to use the File class and the associated read method to access binary file data. After that things just flew. Quite literally, 5 minutes after I started a complete Ruby program was on the screen in front of me that would produce a nicely formatted output to the standard console outlining the contents of the binary file. Could I have written the same thing in C++, sure, would it have been completely done in 5 minutes, doubtful.

This is productivity at its best. The little program is easy to read, can be extended in no time and proves to be a valuable debugging tool. Pretty good for 5 minutes time! This just goes to show, using the right tool / language for the job can really pay off even if you don't know it as well as another tool.