From: Thomas Hurst <tom.hurst@...>
Date: 2002-04-03T03:47:47+09:00
Subject: Re: seeking to understand...

* james@rubyxml.com (james@rubyxml.com) wrote:

> > In my opinion, if you like Perl, you'll love Ruby. But if you come
> > from a background of VB or Java, you will probably prefer Python.
>
> How weird.  I come from a VB/Java/Perl background.  You're right in
> that one can think of Ruby as a better Perl (Perl 6, right? ;) ), but
> VB and Java have too many restrictions for my taste.

I don't think Ruby's way of doing things fits in well with Perl's
There's More Than One Way To Do It[TM] philosophy.  For all it's
flexibility around different coding styles, it's just too damn
simple and consistant to complete ;)

Of course, if you look at it from the perspective "There's More Than One
Way To Do It; The Perl Way and The Right Way", maybe Ruby does fit in >:)

> Python's forced-indentation left a bad taste in my mouth, so I never
> got too excited about it.

Whenever I'm reading Python I always find myself looking for an ending
delimiter at the end of any indentation.  It's the text equivilent of
ramming my head into a low beam every time I move.

And with so much dodgy indentation about (ah, the joys of an editor that
highlights whitespace :) I'm always wondering how many bugs appear in
Python code because they mixed tabs and spaces and had an odd tabstop..

> Ruby is just so much more fluid.  You get more OO than Java, and the
> immediate code-and-run gratification of the VB IDE.

I'm not sure what was meant by the "explicitness" of Python being an
advantage; how is Ruby not explicit?  The Perlish $_ shorthand cruft
isn't that hot, no, but I only ever use that when I'm knocking up
one-time oneliners in a ruby -e '..', and even then I usually write
longhand.

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst  -  freaky@aagh.net  -  http://www.aagh.net/
-
You will be married within a year, and divorced within two.