From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2003-09-02T04:21:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Python vs. Ruby

mark wrote:
>
> On Monday 01 Sep 2003 9:47 am, Hannu Kankaanp粐 wrote:
> > I was quite humoured by this article:
> > http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/kd/courses/pythonruby.pdf
> >
> > It said having to use abs(-5) instead of -5.abs is a "major problem
> > with Python". And I'm afraid they were serious, even though that's
> > not far from begin complete nonsense.
>
> They also seemed to be offended by being able to type
>
> print "Hello world"
>
> Though from their second alternative I guess they weren't aware
> that you can
> write
>
> STDOUT.print "Hello world"
>
> Though IMHO having to write STDOUT all the time would get tiresome very
> quickly (and "hello world".print just looks weird)
>
> So I'd say that Ruby has the right balance of purity and practicality.
>
> > They were not concerned with
> > the syntactic difference between overloaded operator calls and normal
> > function calls, for example. Or that some might actually prefer abs(x).
> > Oh boy, would they enjoy Lisp or Scheme. For some reason, most of us
> > don't.

Regardless of their concluding paragraph, the body of the article still read
more like an endorsement of Ruby.

But, perhaps I'm biased...  :-)

Curt