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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."
"I mean, take Lisp and its performance. Compare it to Ruby's."
Which Lisp? One which (as most implementations of Common Lisp do these days) appropriately and reasonably gets compared to the output of a C compiler?:
http://www.lrde.epita.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Public ations/200606-IMECS
I wouldn't have thought that would be a very fair comparison to make for Ruby.
1) Object Orientation is consistent throughout the language. Perl provides ways to make objects, but none of the built in functions or datatypes are objects, making your code a schizophrenic mess of objects and non-objects.
2) Consistency -- In Perl it is needlessly difficult to do ever simple tasks like making arrays of arrays or arrays of hashes -- you have use a weird syntax to get at references. I never could remember it and always had to look it up whenever I needed an array of arrays in Perl. In Ruby, everything is a reference to an object so you don't have to worry about it -- a[0] = [1, 2] does exactly what you want -- puts an array [1, 2] in the first element of array a.
I used to be a big Perl fanboy -- I did most of my programming in Perl from 1992-1999. But when I discovered Ruby I went for it and never looked back. What's cool about it is that its syntax is so clean that it is basically a version of the pseudocode I have in my head. In the Ruby community there's a phrase for it -- "the principle of least surprise" -- things just work.
Obviously, if you really like Perl, nothing is going to make you change. But if you are just keeping with Perl because of inertia, then you ought to look around at other scripting languages. Ruby is my favorite, but most modern scripting languages are cleaner than Perl.
Lisp is the oldest, still in use, high level programming that exists today. It's the core of emacs, and was standardized into Common Lisp in the early 90's. It basically has no syntax other than words and nested parenthesis (() :-), has an extrememly powerful macro system, and a loyal following of elders that hang out in comp.lang.lisp on usenet. As well, the great Emacs is basically a lisp interpreter (or Operating System) that happens to have a text editor above it.
Smalltalk is another high level language where everything is an object. It has syntax, supports many interesting high level concepts like persistance, and has some nice development environments and pseudo OS projects, one of which is called Squeak.
Ruby is a newer high level language from Japan, that was designed to combine the high level concepts of Lisp, but added some syntax to reduce code verbosity and increase expressiveness. The Lispnicks say this is unnecessary complexity that reduces the power of the language; people that were raised on languages with syntax find the expressiveness more familiar, easy to use and powerful.
I'm still undecided.
Listen to my music.