[OT] Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday

[Judy Perry]

Dan,

Your comments remind me of a conversation I had with my spouse (a Python
user) tonight (okay, _last_ night).

He was high on how you could generate/use on-the-fly generated global
variables in Python, and how he couldn't in  a "real" programming
language... (I dunno, maybe you can in a 'real' language; he's a
statistician and I'm not a programmer, ...)

And then he remarked, "Of course, you could have done this in Hypercard
years ago"...

and, so, he is a step closer to appreciating xTalks.

Judy

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005, Dan Shafer wrote:

> So I spent a good bit of time today with Ruby. I can see how people
> who are working in Java might find Ruby to be "simple, elegant, fun"
> programming. But for those of us coming out of Rev, I have to say I
> thought the Ruby syntax was...well...sorry...ugly.
>
> There were @ and @@ and : and < and # signs strewn all about the Ruby
> landscape. And (yipes) curly braces to boot.
>
> I can't for the life of me see how Ruby is better than Python as a
> language, really. Ruby is line-oriented so white space isn't
> significant like it is in Python but I found that getting used to
> white-space significance took about an hour. So there's no big win
> there. There are lots of interesting-looking high-level components
> for Ruby (they're called Gems...cute) but like Python it uses Tk for
> graphics stuff (ugh). Python has a HUGE number of class libraries.
>
> Rails -- a Web app framework for Ruby -- looks very cool but there
> are lots of great Web app frameworks for Python, too.
>
> I don't know. One thing I am sure of. I won't be spending any time
> with Ruby. I'd rather sharpen Python skills if it comes to doing
> server-side stuff Rev isn't up to. So far, I haven't found anything I
> want to do that Rev can't.
>
> So Rev remains my safe haven.