From: MikkelFJ Date: 2001-07-25T20:15:16+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:18522] Re: Ruby vs. Objective Caml "Todd Gillespie" wrote in message news:9jladi$si6$1@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu... > MikkelFJ wrote: > > : I'm looking hard for something more powerful than C++. > > Why are you looking hard? > No, really. The general move towards server-side apps has unchained lots > of us from C++ GUI toolkits. Not in 20 years have we had so many fine > languages to choose from, and so many feasible opportunities to use them. > So what are you missing? You are definitely right in that serverside apps make it a lot easier to choose a language - but here are some of my concerns: Just the fact that there are many languages to choose from makes it difficult because it takes time to get to know them. But futhermore, very few languages have a mature development environment. They also lack in compile/runtime environment in the sense that it must integrate with other pieces of software, and not only to standard library packages. It is not fun to write foreign function interfaces all the time. It must be possible to deploy the software without too many installation concerns. Then some languages may be clever in one way or the other, but can't give reliable runtime performance - or I find it difficult to trust anyway - despite improvements over the years. I also can't necessarily trust handling of international charactersets. There is much more to a development environment than just the language. However, I guess things are about to change, which is why I am looking. But then again, while it may be the Blub argument (from "Beating the averages"), I feel that I can be quite expressive in C++, especially if I choose to sacrifice speed/memory. You sometimes see a clean implementation of a problem in language X compared to equivalent ugly C code. But if you instead write say 3 small helper functions in C++ throw in some recursion and use STL collections, you end up writing not much more than in langauge X, and it probably runs significantly faster than X. It is probably still slower than what you would normally do in C++ though. Mikkel