From: Jeremy McAnally Date: 2008-06-14T02:00:39+09:00 Subject: Re: A crosspost from the Perl Community Did you just join this mailing list to be a douchebag? I can't believe this conversation is still going. "OMG PERL AND RUBY HAVE DIFFERNET SYNATXCES." Yes. They do. If you hate Ruby's, that's fine, but having worked with Perl, PHP, Java, and C# before I found Ruby, I find it refreshing. The cleaner syntax and more powerful language structures make C# and friends feel brittle and old. But everyone's entitled to their own opinion, of course. Just don't blame people digging Ruby on a web framework and "marketing" (whatever that means). That's just silly. --Jeremy On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 7:16 AM, Jenda Krynicky wrote: > David Masover wrote: >> I really don't think Perl can be made as pretty as Ruby, but then, Perl >> has >> Acme::Lingua::Pirate::Perl, so anything's possible. > > And I don't think Ruby can be made pretty at all. > >>> > Every language can be made messy. Not every language can be made clean. >>> >>> Agreed. For example with the meaningful newlines there are cases when >>> you can't make the Ruby code clean, because you either can't break the >>> overly long line or you can, but you end up with an operator lost on the >>> far right or with some silly line continuation character. >> >> However, with required semicolons, you have every line looking ugly, >> except >> just the edge cases. And that's just line endings -- never mind the >> dereference operator and $calar prefix that become pretty much pure >> annoyance >> for OOP. > > I hate languages that do not use any sigil. I want to know what is a > variable and what is not and be able to tell the difference at the very > first glance. And not have to think about what methods, functions, > classes, ... exist or might exist in the future when naming my > variables. > > And for the semicolons making every line look ugly ... every sentence in > english ends with a dot, except for those that end with a question or > exclamation mark. Does that make the sentences ugly? A statement in a > program is a sentence and a sentence should end with a marker, not fall > off at the end of line unless I bend backwards. > >>> Oftentimes the classes are simple to make but do they give you anything? >> >> Yes, it's called Object-Oriented Programming. Perhaps not in every case, >> but I >> would argue that because of how much more tedious Perl makes classes -- >> and >> nice patterns like setters/getters -- there are going to be cases where >> a >> separate class would really be appropriate, but Perl people will tend >> towards >> data structures instead. > > OOP is not a holly grail, the fact that something is made into a class > with getters and setters doesn't make it any better in itself. A class > that only has the default getters and setters is a pointless class. No > matter how easy was it to create it. You should not be creating classes > just because you can, you should do that because it allows for a cleaner > code, because it allows you to hide some complexity from whoever's using > that class. > >> I don't think this is a comment on the actual languages, but their >> respective >> communities. If people are drawn to Ruby because of pretty syntax, >> they're >> probably likely to hold clean, readable syntax as a desirable goal. > > I don't think people get drawn to Ruby because of pretty syntax. I think > it's all marketing. Ruby on Rails is (or is it still?) hip. The new cool > kid on the block. > > Jenda > -- > Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. > > -- http://jeremymcanally.com/ http://entp.com Read my books: Ruby in Practice (http://manning.com/mcanally/) My free Ruby e-book (http://humblelittlerubybook.com/) Or, my blogs: http://mrneighborly.com http://rubyinpractice.com