From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2006-06-10T12:10:50+09:00 Subject: Re: I love Ruby - But how bright is Ruby's Future? Jeff Pritchard wrote: > "I then jumped into Ruby(a whole lot of fun!) but I don't get the warm > and fussies about > Ruby's lasting power." > > Going back to the original poster's "problem", I think we have to ask > him which kind of "lasting power" he is talking about. Will somebody > still be using it twenty years from now, or will it become a hotbed of > job opportunities in the near and longer term future? > > A tale of two languages... > Forth and C both came onto the scene around the same time (more or less > - work with me here). > In the microcomputer world, there were decent Forth interpreters *long* before a C compiler worthy of the name existed. The competition was between Basic and Forth, not C and Forth. :) > I don't think anyone would try to convince you that Forth is or has ever > been a good way to make a living, but as a quirky, interesting, > portable, dare I say it "fun" language, it has stood the test of time in > the sense that almost any platform you can think of almost immediately > upon creation has a forth interpreter and a small following. It clearly > has "lasting power" of a sort. I think it would be easy to make the > case for Ruby having this type of lasting power. It too is quirky and > "fun". > Forth is an excellent way to make a living in the niche it occupies, embedded systems. It's interesting that you link Forth and Ruby this way, though, because Ruby is much more frequently compared with Lisp (another fun language in a much deeper way) than Forth. Speaking of Forth, I dragged out my gForth/VMgen documentation today, spurred on by the discussions here about virtual machines and core Ruby performance. I don't think Ruby is quirky at all -- not alongside Forth, Lisp, or APL. Ruby is Java done right. :) > C, on the other hand, quickly and somewhat permanently became the > defacto standard against which other newcomers have to battle for a > place in the mainstream. Is it fun? Hardly. What is it about C that > allowed it to gain such a foothold that it is still such a player twenty > years later? > It was the first "portable assembler". If you were at all careful about big-endian versus little-endian, once all the 12-bit, 36-bit, etc. architectures and bizarre non-IEEE floating point formats got flushed out of the marketplace, it was possible to write efficient portable code in a high-level language and have the compiler do the heavy lifting. I don't program in C, but I suppose I should. :) > Answer that, and apply those criteria to Ruby and perhaps you will have > an answer to Ruby's potential for the "other kind" of lasting power. > I don't see why it can't be as efficient as any dynamic language. But you're always going to have the interpretation overhead, so, like Lisp, a compiler needs to evolve into the Ruby run-time environment. > Does Java have that type of lasting power? I think not. I was originally attracted to Java because of "write once, run anywhere". Back then, "anywhere" was Windows, Solaris and half a dozen other breeds of UNIX, including Tru64. Now "run anywhere" is Windows, Linux and I guess Solaris, although I haven't touched a Solaris box in so long I've forgotten what was so special about them. I wrote one piece of software in Java, defying a couple of managers in the process. It never got used. It sits in CM today. I should have written the damn thing in Perl and released it as open source. :) Oh, yeah ... one more thing. This may be the wrong thread to bring this up, but it's certainly the right *forum*. I'm tired of hearing "Ruby programming is fun, and programming in other languages isn't." I've programmed in macro assembler, Fortran, C, Lisp, Pascal, Forth, Ada, Perl, Java, Awk, R, Neliac, APL and even some microcode. It's *all* been fun! Even the microcode ... even the Neliac. Then again, I've never programmed in C++ or worked on a project as a junior member of a 1500-person team. :) -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky http://linuxcapacityplanning.com