From: Isaac Gouy <igouy2@...>
Date: 2008-04-09T08:00:11+09:00
Subject: Re: RubyâEURO(tm)s not ready - an indepth essay

On Apr 7, 9:00 pm, Austin Ziegler <halosta...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/4/7 Song Ma <songm...@gmail.com>:
>
> > Interesting. But what I am thinking about is not the attitude of the author,
> >  but the points he was trying to make. The deep review and discussion will
> >  benefit the language insights.
>
> There's no deep review here. It's a shallow review written in a
> shallow way. The author is completely and wholly incorrect that:
>
>   "The options for Ruby 1.8 users are to install 1.9 or the third-party
>    Oniguruma package... In general, it's a bad sign when a third-party
>    reimplements a large chunk of functionality in an existing piece
>    of software."
>
> This represents pure ignorance. Yes, Ruby 1.8 users must install
> Oniguruma for the features that Oniguruma provides. But it's not a
> "third-party" product as such; it *is* the Ruby 1.9 regexp engine.
> This fact has been known and stated for at least three years, and
> Oniguruma is made available as an option for people who need the
> additional features. (Free clue: not many. Those who do need it really
> need it. Most people don't.)
>
> The author is similarly wholly ignorant of Ruby 1.9 and Ruby 2.0
> discussions and assumes that "lack of English documentation" is the
> same as "lack of documentation." The author is a fool for believing
> the claim that Ruby 2 has been in development longer than Perl 6. Perl
> 6 was ramping up as I switched to Ruby in 2002 and Ruby 1.8 was
> released a bit after that (I got my Ruby 1.8 Pickaxe at the 2005
> RubyConf in San Diego). Matz has been talking about the next
> generation of Ruby (Ruby 2.0) for a while, but that's no different
> than the discussions and experiments surrounding Py3k.




> Worst of all, the author treats both theAliothshootoutand the Zed
> Shaw rant as things worthy of positive attention, when both are, well,
> worthless. TheAliothshootouthas been known to be worthless for
> years yet periodically some idiot treats it as serious.

Once upon a time, you made a specific complaint that the execution
environment, on what used to be called the computer language shootout,
stopped a Ruby Ackermann program from doing it's stuff - that problem
was fixed.

Unfortunately, since then your comments about what is now called the
benchmarks game don't amount to more than name calling.




> Zed's rant was
> a *rant*. It too had things that are known to be false, things that
> are probably libellous, and things that were simply taken out of
> context.
>
> All in all, the authors pretend to be objective when they are anything
> but. They've drunk the Guido-ade and as the resulting article shows
> had no interest in showing Ruby in a positive light. Most of the
> things that they've mentioned are *differences* from Python (neither
> positive nor negative) or have little importance to most applications.
> (Yes, Virginia. Most people don't need full-on Unicode munging in
> their code. It's necessary when you do need it, but most people don't
> need it.)
>
> This article deserves to be buried with great prejudice.
>
> -austin
> --
> Austin Ziegler * halosta...@gmail.com *http://www.halostatue.ca/
>  * aus...@halostatue.ca *http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/
>  * aus...@zieglers.ca