From: Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla Date: 2002-02-08T19:42:41+09:00 Subject: Re: Setting the Ruby On Fri, Feb 08, 2002 at 06:04:55PM +0900, Aidan Mark wrote: > My question is therefore which niches do people predict will launch Ruby > into the mainstream? > The reason why languages like Python and Ruby seem to be gaining popularity is largely due to dissatisfaction with Perl. Perl, for all its virtues as the "swiss army chainsaw" of hackers, is a terrible language to do programming in the large. The fact that Perl makes it easy to do quick and dirty hacks winds up making any large program in it very, very dirty really quickly. As someone who has had to maintain a few large perl scripts with thousands of lines each, I have long personal experience with this fact. Both Ruby and Python have attempted to address these shortcomings in their designs, both by having a clearer syntax and object oriented system cleaner than Perl's. Python, IMHO, went a little too far in this respect, with its baroque ideas about block structuring with whitespace, which operates under the assumption that what's readable code for Guido van Rossum is readable code for everyone. It also didn't go all the way in its object oriented approach, making it a hybrid of a procedural and an object oriented language. Ruby has, on the other hand, taken a more pragmatic approach to cleaning up syntax: by reducing the amount of unnecessary syntactic clutter, and IMHO, this is a Good Thing(tm). Ruby also takes the object-oriented paradigm to its logical conclusion and is an even purer OOP language than Python. We're presently starting to see these two languages eat into the niches that Perl has traditionally filled. I think this is the beginning. -- Rafael R. Sevilla +63(2) 8177746 ext. 8311 Programmer, Inter.Net Philippines +63(917) 4458925 http://dido.ph.inter.net/ OpenPGP Key ID: 0x5CDA17D8 Heute die Welt und Morgen das Sonnensystem!