[ruby-talk:02142] Scripting and OO -- thought question

Here's an opinion question for you all.

I was telling a friend about Ruby the other day,
and I told him how it was OO from the ground up,
unlike Perl, etc.

His interest level was mild. He said that he 
thought object orientation was a good thing in
general, but that for the things scripting 
languages are generally used for, it's not that
useful.

In his words, "If I were going to write a 60,000
line chess program or something, I wouldn't do it
in Perl or any other script; I'd use Java or C++
or something. And if I were doing something like
a filter, like 'munging' a text file, I wouldn't
really need OO."

That's an interesting thought. How would you answer
him?

I think I see his point; but perhaps one reason he
would not use a scripting language for a large 
project is that he simply has never SEEN a scripting
language powerful enough for large projects.

There is also the speed issue; but he cites Java as
a "real" language, and we are certainly not 
guaranteed that it will be speedy on every platform.

Opinions?

Hal Fulton