From: Jan Witt <ontologist_2000@...>
Date: 2002-06-26T15:14:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Andy Roonie meets Perl vs. Ruby... (I couldn't resist)

Dwarves on Giant's shoulders

You guys and dolls seem to be a little too
trigger-happy, when discussing the pros and cons
of Perl, Java and Ruby and their implementations.
Nobody is questioning Matz's eclectic genius in
assembling so many good things in Ruby in such
a clean and consistent fashion.
But why did e.g. Ada, Smalltalk, CLOS not make it?
Why did Perl get such a wide following?
Why are the Ruby lower level primitives so Perlish?
And why is Java the real kludge of kludges?
"A system is a way of looking at the world"(Gerry
Weinberg)
The "minimum astonishment" principle requires people
to have a common or at least convergent understanding
of basic mechanisms (of the language, not somebody's 
library packages).
If given the choice, I personally prefer the 
bare-bones see-through character of Perl to the ad-hoc
stupidities of Java syntactic infelicities and source
pileups.
by the way,
my name in real life is Jan Witt
 


 


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