[ruby-talk:13964] Re: From Guido, with love... [+ Jython & JRuby]

"tony summerfelt" wrote:

> Dave Thomas wrote  on 20 Apr 2001
>
> > This was the first question in the Slashdot interview of Guido van
>
> > Interesting attitude.
>
> first off he's the leader of pythonology
>
> second, it was a deliberate insult to compare ruby to 'parrot'

Well, IMNSHO, it also seems like a very *minor* sort of "deliberate insult",
bordering on playful ribbing, albeit a little 'bird-brained'. :-) FWIW, many
people really do have as much of a visceral stylistic replusion to things
reminiscent of Perlisms in Rubym, just as many other people happen to have
against indentation syntax. For such people, the comparison with Parrot is
not an entirely unreasonable way of describing how they feel about it.

Read the start and finish of Guido's Ruby comments again:

# I just looked it up -- I've never used it.
# ... That said, I'm sure it's cool.

Nothing worth getting bent out of shape about.

> third, EVERYBODY in the python community as a chip on their shoulder about
> every other language.

Umm, it won't take too many more responses like that for people to start
saying the same thing about the Ruby community. :-) Besides, given that only
a tiny fraction of any major language community are active posters, how
could you possibly know that *everybody* in the Python community has such a
chip on their shoulder? Certainly there are many Python zealots, but I've
seen enough counterexamples (on the net and in person) that I would never
engage in a 'deliberate slander' of the entire Python community. I recommend
damning them with faint praise instead. :-)

[But I hasten to add that I think Python is actually a pretty cool language
system with an often informative newsgroup that has some pretty remarkable
developers. And to give more credit where credit is due, I learned about
Ruby from civil discussions on comp.lang.python in the pre-comp.lang.ruby
Dark Ages.]

Anyway, what I found most interesting about Guido's interview were the
following comments:

# [O]ne of my reasons against adding Scheme-style continuations to the
# language (this has seriously been proposed by the Stackless folks)
# is that it can't be implemented in a JVM.

I'm interested in knowing what people who are knowledgeable about such
things think about the major implications of this (if any) for Jython and
JRuby, pro or con.

# I find the existence of
# Jython very useful because it reminds me to think in terms of more
# abstract language semantics, not just implementation details.
#
# IMO the portability of C Python is better than that of Jython, by
# the way.  True, you have to compile C Python for each architecture,
# but there are fewer platforms without a C compiler than platforms
# without a decent JVM.
#
# Jython is mostly useful for people who have already chosen the Java
# platform (or who have no choice because of company policy or simply
# what the competition does). In that world, it is the scripting and
# extension language of choice.


# [Question] does Python need a CPAN?
#
# One of the reasons I still write some things in PERL is because I
# know that I can find and install about a zillion modules quickly and
# easily through the CPAN repository and CPAN module. I'm pretty sure
# that if Python had something similar, like the Vaults of Parnassus
# but more evolved that I would abandon PERL almost entirely.
#
# Do you see things in a similar way? If so, why has Python not
# evolved something similar or better, and what can I do to help it
# along in this realm?
#
# [Answer} It's coming! Check out the action in the catalog-sig
# http://python.org/sigs/catalog-sig/. You can help by joining.
#
# One reason why it hasn't happened already is that first we needed to
# have a good package installation story. With the widespread adoption
# of distutils, this is taken care of, and I foresee a bright future
# for the catalog activities.

Conrad