From: Todd Gillespie Date: 2001-07-26T07:19:11+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:18549] Re: Ruby as opposed to Python? MikkelFJ wrote: : "Todd Gillespie" wrote in message : Exactly - he's argument is that only the programmer of the most powerful : language will know that it is the most powerful language. But then how does : he know the he is not mistakingly programming in Blup and wrongly assumes : Blup to be the most powerful? In other words - why on earth should Lisp be : more powerful than a host of other languages? So Lisp is Blup and Ruby is : the most powerful language, I know that because I program in the most : powerful language. I haven't seen rhetoric that convoluted and pointless since college. :> LISP macros offer an elegant way to dynamically redefine the :> language. Their viability may be a consequence of the uniformity of LISP :> syntax which I will define here as: : But what makes it supposedly better than of a lot of other languages? I : believe some of the functional languages can create functions on the fly and : use them in higher order functions. Is that then less expressive than Lisp : macros? You're talking about lambda; that solves a different problem. With macros you can change the behavior of the interpreter. And please, if you're going to make value statements like 'better', please don't back it up with 'I believe' statements -- use actual facts. : And what about Ruby programs writing Ruby code? It may not be that elegant, : but isn't that just as powerful? Sure. I've already written one. The concept, of course, is as powerful, but the elegance is certainly not -- and elegance is part of power. You can write code generators in a few lines of LISP. Something like Ruby takes hundreds of lines. Therefore, a hypothetical Ruby programmer will avoid that program structure and do something else. I should quote from my last post: :> ... So there is a choice here in language design... I enjoy this community because it's filled with smart people who are not religiously psychotic about their favorite language -- they understand choices in language design, and where a big win in one (like objects in imperative language) is not that big of a deal in other (like objects in pure functionals; check the next thread). They can talk around and about their language without having to agressively defend it at every moment. Until you can do that, please just kill the thread and move on.