[unrev-II] Evaluation of Ruby

From: Eric Armstrong (eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com)
Date: Sat Mar 25 2000 - 17:30:38 PST

  • Next message: John \: "RE: [unrev-II] Digest Number 74"

    From: Eric Armstrong <eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com>

    From: Jeff Miller <jeffm@dynamite.com.au>

    > Have you taken a look at ruby (www.ruby-lang.org).
    > I heard it described as a better perl with oo, garbage
    > collection and dynamic loading. While it may not be
    > suited to the project at hand. I'd be interested to
    > hear people's opinon of it?

    There is a great comparison to other languages at:
    http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/compar.html

    A big red flag went up when I saw this:
      * Ruby's functions (methods) are not first class objects

    That means you can't write a method that takes a function name as
    an argument and then dispatch to it. You can do it in Java, but it's
    ugly. It's the kind of flexibility I'm personally interested in, but
    that
    may not be so important to you.

    There are more important problems, though. Among them: operator
    overloading. This is a *really* bad idea for readability. You may
    *think* you know what "+" does, but "+" may do something totally
    different for a + b and c+d, if the type of a and b is different from
    the
    type of c and d.

    No tuples in Ruby.

    Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I am a language afficianado,
    and am always on the lookout for that one "super language" that
    gets it all right. Right now, Python is looking pretty darn close.

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    DON'T HATE YOUR RATE!
    Get a NextCard Visa, in 30 seconds! Get rates as low as
    0.0% Intro or 9.9% Fixed APR and no hidden fees.
    Apply NOW!
    http://click.egroups.com/1/2120/3/_/444287/_/954034232/
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Community email addresses:
      Post message: unrev-II@onelist.com
      Subscribe: unrev-II-subscribe@onelist.com
      Unsubscribe: unrev-II-unsubscribe@onelist.com
      List owner: unrev-II-owner@onelist.com

    Shortcut URL to this page:
      http://www.onelist.com/community/unrev-II



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Mar 25 2000 - 17:37:43 PST