From: Lothar Scholz Date: 2005-08-13T01:37:07+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby Performance Hello Adrian, AH> On 12 Aug 2005, at 15:27, Bradley Kite wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> I'm a relatively new Ruby programmer, I am curious as to what Ruby is >> trying to achieve that other scripting languages do not already >> offer (Apart >> from the syntactic differences of yet another scripting language, >> that is). >> The reason I ask is that it must offer something that is worth a >> lot considering >> it runs twice as slowly as Perl (see below). AH> Well, non-idiomatic integer arithmatic might run twice as slowly :-) AH> Who cares? I certainly don't since the vast majority of my cycles are AH> not spent in tight loops doing integer arithmetic. If it was I AH> wouldn't be using Perl or Ruby (I'd probably be using Lisp :-) AH> The only performance figures that are important are whether tasks are AH> fast enough in a particular context. Otherwise we'd all be writing AH> assembler. AH> My pitch for Ruby to a Perl programmer would be: AH> - Perl 6 now! Many useful things that Perl 5 lacks and that Perl AH> 6 will give you like a decent built in OO system, classes as proper AH> objects, coroutines, simple block passing, etc. Ruby does now. Yes thats also going to piss me off. I thought they got a few paid full time worker on the language (at least one or two from activestate). But i see almost no progress in Perl 6. Maybe they did a huge mistake when they dicided that all features and programming paradigms currently known in the software world should be supported by Perl6. Sometimes less is more. Especially in language design. -- Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com Lothar Scholz http://www.ruby-ide.com CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's