From: Eric Lee Green <eric@...>
Date: 2001-10-26T14:27:26+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23399] Re: Bruce Eckel's opinion of Ruby

On Thursday 25 October 2001 18:05, you wrote:
> Just a few factual observations.
>
> Eric Lee Green wrote:
[Ruby]
> >... It also makes a
> > superior language for prototyping Java applications, since many aspects
> > (iterators, rinda, single inheritance only, etc.) are similar to Java.
>
> I'm surprised to hear you say that. I would have thought that Python is
> a much better match for Java because you can code in Jython and then
> port bits over to Java incrementally. 

Well, I'm writing distributed applications, and there's no Python library 
which has as close a 1-1 relationship to the Java RMI as the Ruby 'drb' 
library. Python has a very rich set of distributed application API's, but 
none that have that close relationship. In addition, Ruby's recommended 
programming style is very Java-ish, and the syntax is in some ways closer to 
Java than Python's syntax. It just "clicks". 

Regarding coding in Jython, the tasks that I am doing require low-level 
programming that requires writing a "C" module to do some critical function. 
With Ruby or Python I can write a module (and Ruby modules are so much easier 
to write due to lack of reference counting, which is nice if I know that I'm 
going to be throwing it away if the concept proves out and we staff up the 
Java conversion). With Java, I can write a JNI class. With Jython... I 
shudder. 

Note that I work in the NAS division of a manufacturer of optical disk 
library hardware, thus a lot of the things that I do are poking at low-level 
hardware or OS level stuff.  (Hmm, so what do distributed applications have
to do with this? Maybe in 6 months or so we'll both know :-). 

-- 
Eric Lee Green          GnuPG public key at http://badtux.org/eric/eric.gpg
           mailto:eric@badtux.org  Web: http://www.badtux.org
             You do not save freedom by destroying freedom