From: MikkelFJ Date: 2001-07-30T08:50:07+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:18768] Re: Ruby vs. Objective Caml "Steve Tuckner" wrote in message news:Whl77.19057$YK4.1630491@e420r-atl1.usenetserver.com... > Instead of comparing Ruby to the past I would be interested in hearing Ruby > compared against the future. > > I was recently introduced to Objective Caml ( http://www.ocaml.org > ) but haven't had the time to understand it yet. Since just before this was posted, I have been search high on low for more information done much reserach on the topic. This of course does not make me an expert. But it seems to me that OCaml and Clean are the two languages that are fast enough to actually compete with C. And OCaml seems to mix iterative, functional and OO programming in a sort of pragmatic way where Clean has some powerful functional only concepts, that makes "simple" GUI state management the topic of a 16 page dissertion and years of research. That is, there are some programming problems which are not easily handled by Clean, which seems much simpler in OCaml - but I have more to learn. Eventually, I landed on OO shapes examples: http://www.angelfire.com/tx4/cus/shapes/index.html Try compare Ruby with OCaml. OCaml is surprisingly compact. And since OCaml both supports a bytecode interpreter for fast turnaround and a native compiler, OCaml sure seems to be a strong contender. But I don't think OCaml has Ruby scripting power with the many different libraries. Not yet anyway. So OCaml may eventually replace C for many purposes, but it will propably not replace Ruby as a nice multiplatform scripting thing. And everything else being equal - it is much easier to learn Ruby than some strange functional language - at least with the current way of thinking about programming. A potential problem with OCaml is that there is only INRIA to support it. It is not easy for anyone else to write an efficient OCaml compiler. It is much easier to write a half decent C-compiler - I'm not say it is easier to parse, but it is easier to write a code generator for. So C will probably always be the ultimate cross-platform bootstrapping language. Likewise, a simple relatively small runtime portable language like Ruby will probably have a future for its crossplatform scriptinig abilities. Mikkel