From: Todd Gillespie Date: 2001-07-26T08:59:24+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:18555] Re: Ruby as opposed to Python? Peter Hickman wrote: : Speed of development and redevelopment is crucial. It is why Perl stomped : all over C/C++ when it came to Web development. Speed of execution is not an : issue except for the sort of people that can afford the hardware to moot the : issue. Speed of execution is vitally important for server-side code, desktop code, games, scientific computation, graphics work -- basically everything. Computers these days are fast enough that you can throw away 90% of your resources, right up until you get the flood of users and everything stalls. And nowhere is it assumed that this flood of users (or intensive work on desktop code, etc, whatever) brings with it buckets of money. No one is looking to throw away computrons. But, again, speed of actual complex programs comes from profiling and analysis, rather than a 'magical compiler'. And if the language is too low-level to effectively profile, well.... : For me Python was Perl designed by a computer scientist rather than a hacker : (sorry Larry but the Perl syntax reeks of cheap parser design). Perl mark 2 : if you would. Ruby on the other hand was a new language which included : features that Perl had such as text processing that made it so useful. Uhh... I wouldn't repeat that in other groups if I were you. The Perl parser is insanely cool, and not cheap in the least. But then, it has to be, doesn't it? (Of particular interest is how much inference the Perl parser does. For example, see how anonymous hash ref creation and barewords are handled. The parser's accuracy rate of guessing what one 'means' is high bordering on prescient.) The non-insulting description I give to Perl is "a language designed by a sysadmin", because it is, and he was. Accordingly, its use in that is still unchallenged. : It is not unusual that there are more Smalltalk people here than anywhere : outside of a Smalltalk NG. Ruby does OO well and Smalltalk programmers are : rather fussy about their OO, to me it is a sign that it has been done right. : Now if we could design something to get the Lisp people on board... Read the rest of the thread.