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

Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby

[Jonathan]

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.