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

Genuine question about perl vs ruby

[thanasakis]

I am not trying to start a holy war thread about perl vs ruby, just looking for someone that can enlighten me regarding the following question.

Having perl as it is, what are the reasons to take a look at ruby. Mind you, I am not saying that these reasons do not exist, I guess I was just lazy to find it out by myself and then again, nobody has yet offered any compelling reason. I have taken a good look at ruby, clean syntax and all, but really I couldn't find something really compelling.

An interesting phenomenon is that most stuff that people perceive as a reason to go to ruby from perl, are available in perl too, but somehow they offer those stuff an novel.

Please don't take me the wrong way, I can testify that ruby is indeed a kick ass piece of work, I am trying to find real reasons to use it along side with perl.

So, fire away your opinions!

Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby

[CoughDropAddict]

Actually there is a good reason to look at Perl given Ruby. Regular Expressions. Ruby has a object and method for doing regular expressions but compared to Perl it's very combersome and is even lacking some of the properties that Perl's regex has.

Cumbersome? Which is this, Perl or Ruby?

"Hello, World!" =~ /Hello, (\w+)!/;
print $1;

Trick question -- it's both. What exactly about Ruby's way is cumbersome?

Re:Performance, anyone?

[Lucas.Langa]

As funny as your comment is, it made me wonder... There is a very loud pro-Lisp community that tells everyone who is not using Lisp that they should since it solves most of the problems they have in the first place. OK, fair enough. But I have that strange feeling that assuming the developers to be usually very smart and very lazy, we would see them all convert to Lisp if it really was the ultimate answer [1].

And what makes me think that Lisp was and still is widely ignored? There are a couple of points here but the most important is: we don't really see a large, consistent standard library for Lisp. So we could easily turn the Greenspun's 10th Rule backwards to say: any sufficiently complicated Common Lisp program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug ridden, slow implementation of half of Java's standard library.

So, where's the catch? Why isn't Lisp popular if it's so 1337?

[1] But we know it's 42.

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

[HiThere]

You never heard of Python, Ruby, or Smalltalk? That explains your problem.

For years even though I swore at VB I didn't really hate it. Then I caught it in an arithmetic mistake. I, a human, caught a computer at an arithmetic mistake. Understand, I'm not talking about the program, I traced the error down to one specific statement in a program, placed print statements before and after it. VB made an arithmetic mistake. Then I started to wonder about all the larger numbers that I hadn't checked over the years.

That was the last program that I ever wrote that used VB for arithmetic. The next one I used an external Eiffel program to do the arithmetic. The one after that I had it all happen in an Excel spreadsheet. Since them I've moved to Python and Ruby...and totally off of MS systems.

I don't believe that anyone who is a decent programmer likes VB, though many use it due to coercions of various forms. (You mention interesting jobs.) Most people probably haven't noticed that it sometimes lies. (And maybe they've stopped doing that. This happened in MSAccess2000, around 2000.)

No dialect of BASIC has ever been a decent programming language, throughout it's history. (Well, there are lots of versions that I haven't tried, so that's excessive. Some people said that Pick Basic was quite good.) It strongly encourages bad programming habits and discourages several good ones. There are dialects of BASIC in which it is actually impossible to write a decent program. Or a stable one (different group). This isn't to assert that it can't be very convenient. Especially in environments that are designed to encourage it's use.