> Tell me, what is less effort: Implementing that, or building a small app/service that performs the functionality you need using existing tools?
I think it depends on your use case. In certain cases, you want to do work inline. In other cases, you want to do PS manipulation in the background. I could imagine projects that go in either direction. If I had a large Python desktop application, I'd port the code. If I had a Django application that wanted to do background processing of PS documents, I'd put the work on a queue and have Ruby take care of the messy bits.
> Also I'd consider the suitability of a given technology before this too, e.g. on my current project there is a lot of Ruby code, but it's a major bottleneck in one of our services performing a particular task. We rewrote that service in Clojure and it performs orders of magnitude faster and uses orders of magnitude less memory.
I take a different approach. If I find a bottleneck in Python code, I use ctypes or write a C extension. I'd do the same thing in Ruby. I'm hesitant to deploy multiple runtimes, since I worry about security updates, etc. If I were on JRuby, Clojure would be a natural fit -- I'd only be deploying one JVM.
