From: Devin Mullins <twifkak@...>
Date: 2006-09-04T11:33:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky on languages for web programming

David Vallner wrote:
> Noone cares about pretty. It's also a completely irrelevant issue when 
> deciding on implementation language if you're at least remotely 
> responsible.
*Everyone* cares about pretty. http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

Pretty means understandable, maintainable, clean (and what the heck does 
clean mean? reduced duplication?). Pretty means fewer LOC, which is 
about the only objective measure of maintainability we know. (Cyclomatic 
complexity being another, I suppose..) Pretty means fun, which we all 
know means productive.

> Speaking purely theorethically, Ruby can not be made as performant as 
> Java or C# could be made if they had ideally performing implementations. 
> Latent typing makes it almost impossible to do certain optimizations as 
> static typing does. That's pure fact.
Irrelevant. In many cases, the fact that Ruby has latent typing is an 
*implementation detail*. Ruby has *no type declarations*, but in many 
cases static type inference can be applied to get the same optimizations 
of which Java and C# implementations avail themselves. (Disclaimer: 
that's about as much as I know about this subject.)

That's not to say that I expect the current CRuby maintainers to add 
such optimizations. They seem not to care, and that's just fine by me.

Devin