From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2001-10-24T07:27:24+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23107] Re: Bruce Eckel's opinion of Ruby

Eric Lee Green wrote:

> Disclaimer: I have written approximately 100,000 lines of Python in the
> past 2 years, and approximately 10,000 lines of Ruby in the past 2 months.
> Thus I am approximately 10 times more expert in Python than in Ruby. I
> don't, however, have any particular axe to grind regarding languages,
> heck, I even write my web pages in PHP (one of the most bletcherous
> excuses for a programming language to come down the pike -- but excellent
> for quicky one-off weblets).

That was a good run-down.

> 9. Reference counting (Python) is more memory-efficient than garbage
> collection (Ruby), since it frees up memory as references are destroyed

I've never found Ruby to suffer from poor memory management.

> 10. Reference counting works hand-in-hand with Python's destructors to
> handle resource cleanups in a real-time manner that's difficult with Ruby

This (and 9) would be easily solved by a mechanism to force the garbage 
collector to run; if Ruby doesn't have one, it should.

> 15. Python has a much better Emacs mode than Ruby. I especially like the
> class browser.

You can tell an emacs freak by the fact that they choose their programming 
languages by how well supported they are by emacs ;-)

> Final conclusions: I must agree with Bruce Eckel that I could not
> recommend that a Python programmer move to Ruby except in very special
> circumstances, because the two languages are so similar that there's no
> real advantage to doing so. In my case I'm using Ruby because I needed to

Yeah, that's a tough call.  *I'd* recommend them switching, because I hate 
Python with something approaching passion, and the less of it I have to 
encounter, the happier I am.  For a beginner, though, I'd recommend Ruby.  
I've been programming in one thing or another since 1983, and the syntax in 
Python's "hello world" was enough to turn me off.

> aspects (iterators, rinda, single inheritance only, etc.) are similar to
> Java. I would not, however, relish attempting to manage 100K+ lines of
> Ruby code for a project, while Python proved to be quite usable for 100K+
> lines of code.

Apart from my dislike of Python syntax, I'd have no trouble accepting 
maintenance of 100K+ lines of Ruby code, assuming the code was written by 
someone sane; I'd prefer this to taking on, say, 100K+ lines of C code, or 
even Java code.  Ruby is so orthogonally OO that I can't imagine that it 
wouldn't be noticeable on a large scale.

I agree that Ruby has a certain harmonic with Java; since I've been coding 
almost exclusively in Java since 1995, I would imagine that the feeling of 
similarity is why I prefer Ruby.

--- SER