From: Conrad Schneiker <schneiker@...>
Date: 2000-05-26T04:04:47-05:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:02997] Re: Ruby, moxilla & xpcom

Hi,

ts wrote:

> >>>>> "C" == Conrad Schneiker <schneik@austin.ibm.com> writes:
>
> C> However, I also think that Perl and Python are full-fledged programming
> C> languages as well Ruby, and I have certainly previously used Perl as
such. I
> C> don't think we should demean Perl and Python (or otherwise
mischaracterize
> C> them) by calling them scripting languages, which is what bsh, csh, ksh,
bash,
> C> Tcl, and so on are. There are better ways to say that Ruby is a better
OO
> C> programming language than Perl or Python--as for instance, by simply
saying
> C> so.
>
>  See the thread "Perl unusable as a programming language" on c.l.p.m
>
>   http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=627235761
>
>  Especially the comment from Ilya Zakharevich (ilya@math.ohio-state.edu)

Well, I'm sure you already know I strongly disagree.

However, to elaborate, I think his comment (and some of the others that I
randomly sampled) shows how you can myopically focus on one aspect of
something to the exclusion of the overall context, idiosyncratically warp
some definitions, and then readily jump to patently ridiculous flame-bating
conclusions. (Hmm, I don't seem to have quite reached his level of hyperbole
yet. But let's keep trying. :-)

If you *really* want to take his aggressive moron style of arguing seriously
(please excuse what I hope is an obviously oxymoronic phrasing here :-),
then you should include the whole range of such sorts of arguments.
Otherwise you might fall prey to thinking in scripting mode by accepting the
first thing that seems to make sense, rather than thinking in *real*
programming mode. Let us proceed then proceed to think about this like
*real* programmers! :-)

For instance, despite the retrospectively obvious disadvantages, a
surprising number of people did programming by trial and error back in the
punched card days, when the documentation was often poor and the compliers
often unreliable, so on all these counts, they weren't using real
programming languages, but scripting languages. Alternatively, a "good"
Cobol programmer can argue that C and FORTRAN are not real programming
language because they don't have a built-in decimal datatype that handles
decimal fraction arithmetic exactly, which thereby puts the financial
infrastructure of the whole world at peril. By the fairly easy
multiplication of such examples, you can readily conclude that there are no
real programming languages at all! At long last, we now we know the real
cause of the 40+ year long annually proclaimed software crisis! :-)

But this is pretty obviously not within the generally overlapping realms of
what the vast majority of people in computer science or numerous other
fields variously mean by programming and programming languages--despite the
self-serving efforts of a certain very talented Tcl
innovator-turned-commercial-promoter to muddy the scripting/programming
waters so as to (IMHO) better sell new or naive technical managers on the
notion that Tcl was in the same league as Perl and Python.

I think that Tcl is actually useful enough for many things that it can be
sold on its own merits, without that sort of spin-doctoring. Likewise,
people can express the fact that Perl and Python aren't perfect for every
conceivable real-time process-control application by simply saying so,
rather than absurdly denying that Perl and Python are real programming
languages.

Or maybe I should say, at least *some* people can do this. :-)

Anyway, back to the original topic, which I think is much more interesting,
and is much more worthy of our attention. It made it onto www.slashdot.org
recently:

===============================
WhyteRabbyt writes: "ActiveState have announced Komodo, an open-source IDE
for Perl, Python and Javascript. The application framework is to be based on
Mozilla. The press release is here." tenchiken contributed a bit more
information about the project, writing: "More information is here ,
including the announcement a few days ago that they would be writing python
and perl bindings to XPCOM. Like Perl? How 'bout client side perl!" No, it's
not out yet -- but it's cool to see Mozilla as the engine behind yet another
project.
===============================

The referenced links and the discussion that follows may be found at:

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/26/0047216&mode=thread

Conrad