Lisp and Ruby

sdelmont writes "The developers of Rubinius, an experimental Ruby interpreter inspired by SmallTalk, have been discussing the possibility of adding a Lisp dialect to their VM. Pat Eyler collected some ideas and opinions from the people involved and it makes for some interesting reading. For many, Ruby already is an acceptable Lisp, and the language itself started as a 'perlification' of Lisp (even Matz says so) so it is perhaps fitting and might help explain why the whole idea feels right. Now, if someone added support for VB and gave it the respect it deserves, the world would be a better place."

Comments

VB already gets the respect it deserves...

[GotenXiao]

...absolutely none. It's a horrible language. The only thing it has going for it is the reasonably useful IDE (although even that irritates me most of the time).

Re:VB already gets the respect it deserves...

[iJed]

absolutely none. It's a horrible language

What is worse are the idiots who program in it. They will blindly defend it even though (in general) they have never used and have no knowledge of any other language.

I have met VB.NET developers who do not understand what an array is. I have yet to meet a VB.NET developer who:

• Understands what an interface is
• Understands what a class method is
• Understands inheritance
• Really understands the difference between reference and value types
• Uses classes instead of modules

Re:VB already gets the respect it deserves...

[Colin Smith]

As horrible as it might be and as crap as the developers may be, they actually produce useful software. VB is programming for people who don't really want to program. They don't want to learn a beautiful or elegant language they just want the result to be x, y and z and they don't care how to get there, they don't even care very much about performance. It's good enough and that's all that matters.