From: Terry Poulin <bigboss64@...>
Date: 2007-10-01T01:42:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Can you please help to make decision?


If you are not the best at English, I would suggest Ruby.

Personally, I find Pythons documentation boring and dull, but good if you are
familiar with programming (and English). Ruby, is a little more newbie
friendly in my humble opinion when it comes to documentation. Although I don't
meant to insult any one (and I would actually like to help improve it some
day), I think Ruby's documentation is not as good quality as Pythons -- but is
more then suitable for *most* things.



> I think ruby's syntax looks like chicken scratchings, and I have a C++
> background. C++ has the most difficult syntax I have seen--except maybe
> perl's.  In my opinion, python's syntax is much more human readable than
> ruby's.  I guess if you are coming from perl, then ruby's syntax would
> seem incredibly clear.  Of course, if you know a language well, it's
> easy to read.  I think the test is whether someone who doesn't know a
> language well can make heads or tails out of what is going on in some
> basic code. I don't think ruby is ever going to be readable in that way.
>
> Ruby also relies heavily on regex's, and regex's are never going to be
> easy to read for anyone.  regex's are not beginner friendly, and that
> might be a big barrier for a beginner trying to learn ruby.  There are
> lots of people who just can't learn regex's.
>

The C side of the syntax is easy, C++ just complicates it ^_^. My first
language was C++, I know the most about standard C of any language. But I
don't know C++ very well any more.


I've always found most languages to be fairly readable if some times hard to
follow the *specifics* of some things without knowing more about the language.
For example, if I didn't know about Blocks in Ruby, I might not get it until
after I had examined several examples. Much the same as Joe Blow probably
wouldn't know what on earth a Union is in C/C++ without knowing about them.
But understanding the struct idea is not to hard if your mind can grasp struct
= short for structure.


I've found Ruby very good for producing human readable code, it's not
*perfect* but works pretty nice in my experience. And this is coming from a
C99 Lover with a very  nit picky convention for naming things ^_^.


TerryP.



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