From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2002-04-03T03:53:33+09:00
Subject: Re: seeking to understand...

In article <5.1.0.14.2.20020402120326.029c6e80@zcard04k.ca.nortel.com>,
Mark Probert  <probertm@nortelnetworks.com> wrote:
>
>Dear All,
>
>[Please note that I don't want to start a flame-fest, rather to
>seek to understand.  I seek to cause no offence in sending this
>post and humbly apologise if it does.]
>
>I recently found the following article at Bruce Eckel's site:
>
>         http://www.mindview.net/Etc/FAQ.html#Ruby
>
>In it, he says --
>
>"FWIW, I usually find that this question [Do you have any opinions
>about the Ruby language, especially compared to Python?] is asked
>by someone who is considering learning to program, and was snagged
>by the fact that Ruby is new, and perhaps thinks that it's going to
>be the next great thing like Java. From everything I can see, it's
>not. For some reason, the creator of the language saw Python and
>decided to do a clone, and people who had never used Python thought
>it was a good idea. Harsh, maybe, but that's my impression: if you've
>used Python at all, you wouldn't give Ruby a second glance."
>
>Mr Eckel is entitled to his opinion.  I have read and respected his
>opinion based on the "Thinking in..." books and earlier works of his
>I have read in various journals, so I don't want to dismiss it as
>an ignorant rant.
>
>Can any on the list who are familiar with both Python and ruby comment
>on the last sentence of the above?  What made you take a "second glance"
>at ruby?

I don't really qualify (I came from Perl to Ruby) - but will point out 
that Mr. Eckel's remarks reflect a lack of knowledge about Ruby.  
To call Ruby a 'clone' of Python (especially at the time he wrote this 
prior to the Python 2.2 release) reflects this lack of knowledge.  
Ruby has several important features lacking in Python, such as lexical 
closures.  And the fact that Python just recently added iterators and 
a unified type/class system could be seen (if we were to take 
Mr. Eckel's attitude) as an attempt to clone Ruby within Python.
I think that it is very rare for new languages to take quantum leaps.  
Language development seems to generally follow a more evolutionary 
path so to say that a language doesn't have merit simply because it has a 
lot of features similar to an existing language seems a bit odd to me.

That said, I suspect that Ruby probably isn't as compelling for Python 
programmers as it is for Perl programmers ( and maybe that's partially 
because Python doesn't have closures, Python programmers don't know what 
they're missing. ;-)  However, I'm sure that there are some 
Python programmers here that have learned Ruby and like it.

Phil