[ruby-talk:02162] Re: Scripting and OO -- thought question

From: <[e-mail]>

> 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."

Wait a minute! A 60,000 line chess program in Java or C++ could turn out to
be a 10,000 line program Perl. This sort of comparison is like saying, if I
had to power a large ship across the ocean, I would use 60,000 gallons of
wood chips rather than 60,000 gallons of diesel fuel. Lines of code per task
is a language-specific metric, just as energy per unit of fuel is a
fuel-specific measure.

Speaking of human performance, large programs are often more difficult to
comprehend and maintain when there is 5x to 10x more stuff that you have to
look at. For reasonably written/commented code, total size still turns out
to be roughly correlated with support costs across many languages.

> 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.

Well, the first thing to recall is that the requirements for large projects
vary all over the map. In many cases solving an urgent problem is much more
important (within certain bounds) than raw performance. Look at www.perl.com
for Perl success stories or talk to head-hunters that are looking for
serious Perl experts if you want to find out about large projects that were
written in Perl, the so-called "duct tape of the web". Likewise, look at
links off of www.python.org for info about the use of Python for large
projects in corporations and national labs. Their respective newsgroups have
bashed this topic mercilessly. Most of their considerations (with a few
exceptions such as Perl's monster sized library of modules) apply just as
much or even more so to Ruby.

> 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.

Speed is often a much stronger function of design and modules/algorithms
used than choice of language. If you look inside may Perl and Python and
Ruby modules, you find C.

The other thing to keep in mind is that it is almost always a much more
effective use of your time to concentrate on converting those who are
already predisposed to what you are selling when you have a very large
market. As long as there are some 10 X to 100 X more Perl and Python users
in the world than Ruby users, I'd leave it to them the substantially more
difficult task of converting others to such types of tools, and concentrate
on attracting the Perl and Python users who have run into the limitations of
their tools, who already constitute a giant and ready-made market for Ruby.
(Of course there are exceptions to this general policy, such as when you
really want to save a friend's soul. :-)

Conrad