What's better about Ruby than Python?

[Anton Vredegoor]

"Andrew Dalke" <adalke at mindspring.com> wrote:

[defines cognitive macro called Speech]

>I've created a new language, called Speech.  It's based on the core
>primitives found in the International Phonetic Alphabet.  I've made some
>demos using Speech.  One is English and another is Xhosa.  This just
>goes to show how powerful Speech is because it can handle so many
>domains.  And it's extensible!  Anything you say can be expressed in
>Speech!

[snip lots of examples using it, trying to make macros look bad?]

>In short, no one is denying that the ability to create new macros is
>a powerful tool, just like no one denies that creating new words is
>a powerful tool.  But both require extra training and thought for
>proper use, and while they are easy to write, it puts more effort
>for others to understand you.  If I stick to Python/English then
>more people can understand me than if I mixed in a bit of Erlang/
>Danish, *even* *if* the latter makes a more precise description
>of the solution.

You have found a wonderful analogy, however you seem to assume that
your prejudices are so self explanatory that the conclusion that
macros are bad is natural.

I am not a native English speaker, and so my expressiveness in this
language is severely handicapped, while I consider myself a person
with good linguistic abilities. 

Obviously there are people from other linguistic backgrounds
participating in discussions in this newsgroup who have the same
problems. Maybe they are greater speakers than me and yet have still
more problems using English. 

However this does not in the least cause this newsgroup to deviate
substantially (or maybe it does but as a non-native speaker I can not
discern the difference) from English. Rather we all strive to speak
the same language in order to make as much people as possible
understand what we are saying.

While using Python as a programming language we strive for Pythonicity
and for combining elegance with concisiveness and readability. We are
using docstrings to comment our code and answer questions about it in
the newsgroup. Helpful people debug our code and assist in formulating
our algorithms in Python.

IMO there is a strong tendency towards unification and standardization
among the readers of this newsgroup and the need to conform and the
rewards this brings are well understood.

Seeing all this it would be a missed chance not to give the community
the freedom of redefining the language to its advantage.

Of course there are risks that the community would dissolve in
mutually incompatible factions and it would be wise to slow down the
process according to the amount of responsibility the group can be
trusted with.

The rewards would be incomparably great however, even to the amount
that I would be ready to sacrifice Python only to give this thing a
tiny chance. Suppose you could make a bet for a dollar with an
expected reward of a thousand dollars? Statistically it doesn't matter
whether you get a .999 chance of getting a thousand dollars or a
.00999 chance of getting a million dollars.

Therefore, the only thing pertinent to this question seems to be the
risk and gain assessments.

>By this analogy, Guido is someone who can come up with words
>that a lot of people find useful, while I am someone who can come
>up withs words appropriate to my specialization, while most
>people come up with words which are never used by anything
>other than close friend.  Like, totally tubular dude.

Another relevant meme that is running around in this newsgroup is the
assumption that some people are naturally smarter than other people.
While I can certainly see the advantage for certain people for keeping
this illusion going (it's a great way to make money, the market
doesn't pay for what it gets but for what it thinks it gets) there is
not a lot of credibility in this argument. 

The "hardware" that peoples minds are running on doesn't come in
enough varieties to warrant such assumptions. For sure, computer
equipment can vary a lot, but we as people all have more or less the
same brain.

Of course there is a lot of variation between people in the way they
are educated and some of them have come to be experts at certain
fields. However no one is an island and one persons thinking process
is interconnected with a lot of other persons thinking processes. The
idea that some kind of "genius" is solely responsible for all this
progress is absurd and a shameful deviation to the kind of
"leadership" philosophical atrocities that have caused many wars.

To come back to linguistic issues, there's a lot of variation in the
way people use their brain to solve linguistic problems. There are
those that first read all the prescriptions before uttering a word and
there are those that first leap and then look. It's fascinating to see
"look before you leap" being deprecated in favor of "easier to ask
forgiveness than permission" by the same people that would think twice
to start programming before being sure to know all the syntax.

In my case for example studying old latin during high school there was
a guy sitting next to me who always knew the different conjugations
the latin words where in and as a result he managed to get high grades
with exact but uninteresting translations. My way of translating latin
was a bit different, instead of translating word for word and looking
up each form of each separate word (is it a genitivus, ablativus
absolutus, imperativus, etcetera) I just read each word and going from
the approximative meaning of all words put in a sequence of sentences
I ended up with a translation that was seventy percent correct and
that had a lot of internal consistency and elegance. It was usually
enough to get a high enough grade and also some appraisal: "si non e
vero, e ben trovato" or something like that.

What this all should lead to I am not really sure, but I *am* sure
that breaking out of formal mathematical and linguistic and
programmatic rules is the only way to come to designs that have great
internal consistency and that can accommodate for new data and
procedures. 

It is sometimes impossible for a language designer to exactly pinpoint
the reasons for a certain decision, while at the same time being sure
that it is the right one. 

The ability to maintain internal consistency and the tendency of other
people to fill in the gaps so that the final product seems coherent is
IMO the main reason for this strange time-travel-like ability of
making the right decisions even before all the facts are available.

Well, maybe I have made the same mistake as you by providing arguments
to the contrary of my intention of advocating the emancipation of the
average Python user to the level of language designer.

However if I have done so, rest assured that my intuition "knows" from
before knowing all the facts that this is the way to go, and the
rewards are infinitely more appealing than the risks of breaking up
the Python community are threatening.

One way or the other this is the way programming will be in the
future, and the only question is: Will Python -and the Python
community- be up to the task of freeing the programmers expressiveness
and at the same time provide a home and starting point to come back
to, or will it be left behind as so many other valiant effort's fate
has been? 

Anton