Ruby Impressions

[Phil Tomson]

In article <9u064uc19eh877c5ov3afodf98rkdov7dq at 4ax.com>,
Michael Kelly  <mkelly2002NOSPAM at earthlink.net> wrote:
>On Sun, 13 Jan 2002 23:35:23 -0000, "czrpb" <nanotech at europa.com>
>wrote:
>
>>This pretty much closed the book on Ruby for me--another language
>>which simply wanted to do "cool things" but did/does not care about
>>readability.
>
>
>Anyway, I guess with the shrinking market there's a lot
>of paranoia about which languages will survive but I
>don't think Perl/Python/Ruby people cutting each
>other up is going to help much.  

Quite right, though I'm not sure the language market is indeed shrinking 
(though I suspect that you were referring to the economy) - There is 
plenty of room for Perl and Python and Ruby.

If you're referring to the shrinking economy - I suspect that that will 
have little effect on the open source languages, in fact it might be 
slightly positive for them since the tools are free.

>Seems like winning
>converts from people new to scripting who venture
>into C# because they know C might be more fruitful.
>Show them what else is possible.. that type of thing.

Or, that non-type of thing (meaning dynamic languages) ;-)
Most programmers you talk to have a statically typed view of the world - 
they have no idea what dynamically typed languages like Ruby or Python can 
do for them.  I recently attended a talk on generic programming which 
ended up being a talk on C++ templates.  Throughout the whole thing I kept 
thinking that generic programming comes naturally in a dynamic language, 
you don't have to go through all the contortions that are needed in a 
compile-time, statically-typed language like C++.  OOP in general 'feels' 
very different in a dynamically typed language vs a statically typed one. 
Polymorphism, for example, seems much easier to really use to your 
advantage in a dynamically typed language.

But again, most programmers out there have no idea that there are any 
other languages besides C/C++, Java (or C#) and this heavily influences 
their worldview.

So, Pythonistas and Rubyists should see themselves as being on the same 
side of this particular argument.

Phil