From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-01-01T05:03:22+09:00
Subject: Re: About Steve Yegge's 'Opinions considered harmful' post

Gregory Seidman wrote:

>I came to Ruby because I had been resisting learning Perl and Python for
>years. Perl because of its unholy nastiness (I can still understand the
>shell scripts I wrote a decade and a half ago; can anyone say the same
>about a perl script written even a year ago?), and Python because of its
>significant whitespace (there are those who say it's a feature; let's agree
>to disagree). Finally, a scripting language with pleasant syntax, a strong
>community, and a rich ecosystem of libraries springs up. Even better, it
>has the main benefits of Perl (regex wizardry) and the good design sense of
>SmallTalk. Once I learned about that stuff, I decided I would learn it.
>  
>
Hmm ... I moved from (n)awk/sed/(k)sh to Perl (4) precisely *because* of 
the readability! This was about 10 years ago. In particular, I never 
have found ksh particularly readable. Before Perl, all I used ksh for 
was executing (n)awk scripts, and I rarely used sed at all. Most of this 
"application" was written in awk, and worked with either nawk or gawk 
but not with pure awk.

Times change ... if I were implementing the pacakge now I'd use Ruby 
instead of the mix of Perl and R it has evolved into from the original awk.

>Granted, it was not until I decided to develop a Rails app that I actually
>got around to learning it. And I was delighted both by the ease with which
>I developed the toy web app I was working on and the pleasure of using the
>language itself.
>  
>
I think a lot of us discovered Ruby from being immersed in the Rails 
hype. I actually discovered it about two years ago in connection with 
computer music; Ruby is used in the GridFlow package. But I never took 
the time to learn it then, or even mess with GridFlow -- I moved back to 
Lisp, which is where much of the experimental music community resides.

>Oh, and why did I actually need to learn a scripting language (other than
>awk/sed/sh which I know well already)? I didn't. I just felt the itch to
>learn a new language.
>  
>
I wanted to learn web application design specifically rather than Ruby. 
I suppose I should have picked PHP to learn, since a lot more web apps 
are written in PHP than Ruby/Rails. I may yet learn PHP, but certainly 
from the point of view of language design elegance, Ruby is light-years 
ahead of the "big three" scripting languages -- Perl, PHP and Python.

Strangely enough, the one "wart" on Ruby in my opinion is the 
continuation of the UNIX/vi/awk/sed/perl "tradition" of regular 
expression syntax and semantics. I appreciate its usefulness and its 
ubiquity, certainly, but it is decidedly awkward to me, even after 
having used it for 20 years. Using it represents a thinking mode shift 
for me; it's as if my programs are speaking two different languages. 
Perhaps Matz can earn a lasting place in the computer science Hall of 
Fame by developing a more elegant way to do these tasks "The Ruby Way".

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com