From: Dido Sevilla Date: 2005-04-02T22:00:41+09:00 Subject: Re: Getting Ruby approved On Apr 1, 2005 10:56 AM, Hal Fulton wrote: > On the one hand, all Turing-complete languages are equivalent. > To a computer, yes. To a computer programmer no. Languages like unlambda and BF exist partly to prove this point. > In a more practical vein, sometimes there are libraries/packages > with which you need to interface, making some language a more > natural choice than others. > A few years ago this was what made me (reluctantly) write a bit of code in Java rather than in Ruby. Three years ago there did not exist a Ruby library for Jabber as full-featured as the one for Java. Looking back I think perhaps it might have been a better strategy to have written that library for Ruby myself, now that the Java code has evolved into something of an unmaintainable morass... > Neither of these points sells Ruby. What sells Ruby is the > productivity that programmers have when they use it. > Amen. To add fuel to the flames, I've recently been asked by a client to justify the use of Ruby for our project development, and I've written some of the arguments that I mentioned to them (and a few more) in my blog here: http://stormwyrm.blogspot.com/2004/12/why-ruby.html Well, they were convinced, and we're gonna slowly convince them to move from Perl little by little... ;)