What's better about Ruby than Python?

Donn Cave donn at u.washington.edu
Wed Aug 20 17:11:42 EDT 2003


In article <66d7kvonvb2n0nqbqahhd5roak7ur81sob at 4ax.com>,
 Doug Tolton <dtolton at yahoo.com> wrote:

[... re should Python spawn another language that supports macros ]

> That certainly is one way for it to happen. I must say I certainly am
> suprised at your vehemence.  I don't think the natural state of human
> beings is singular in purpose or design.  I think the natural state of
> humans is to fracture into competing camps / factions.  *Every* human
> system of any size has factions of some sort or another.  I think the
> power of Unix / Linux in general has been in working to allow these
> factions to Co-exists peacefully.  By trying to prevent factioning
> within the community, I think you will ultimately only be successful
> in driving people with different viewpoints out of the community.

Fragmentation helps and hurts.  The fork that Alex suggests is
at least clear, like the choice between regular Python and Stackless.
Language change through macros is more insidious because the whole
language bears some of the burden, while the benefit if there is
any goes to the macro-extended dialect.

There's nothing wrong with people with different viewpoints
leaving the community.  There are all kinds of interesting things
happening in computer programming languages, thanks to people with
different viewpoints who have followed their vision.  I personally
don't think Python+macros sounds very interesting, but as long as
there's no confusion between that and Python, it's no problem as
far as I'm concerned.

   Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu




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