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On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Abigail wrote: > One thing that bothers me about Python is that one of things they claim > as a good thing about their language is that "it isn't Perl". And I have > the same problem with both PHP and Ruby. Whenever I read a piece that's > supposed to promote Python, PHP or Ruby, somewhere in the beginning they > must remark how much better they are than Perl. > > They're just like Go players. They can't explain what's so great about > their game either. But it's better than chess! An ironic comparison, I think, since the things that make ruby and go great are similar: The thing doesn't get in the way of the goal of the thing. Ruby has a relatively minimal (relative to, of course, LISP), and Go has a very simple ruleset. Ruby does a very good job of getting the hell out of your way, such that you can see the program, or the intent, behind the syntax, and Go does a good job of getting the hell out of your way so that you see that strategy behind the game. Or something; I haven't played Go (yet). It's always easier to compare something you understand to something the audience understands, so it's naturally easy to compare Ruby to perl and Go to chess, and most people are unfortunately poor at explaining, um, anything. I like Ruby because it seems to have the best combination of the features I care the most about, which largely amount to having a minimalist syntax without being so minimalist that it makes me feel like I'm actually writing in binary (LISP), along with allowing insane amounts of introspection (this is the feature that really just makes me go ga ga), and finishing up by being very dynamic (i.e., no static type-checking constantly -- I can make an array of different types of objects, and then call the same method on each object in turn, without having the parser think it's smarter than me and forcing me to do all kinds of stupid casting to tell the parser that I know what I'm doing) and not making me manage my own damn memory. I _hate_ doing things the computer can do for me. -- The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service depends on the Microsoft Exchange Directory service which failed to start because of the following error: The operation completed successfully. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://config-mgmt.blogspot.com
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