Really? You don't know what a "theory" is, in the sense of "theory" the way people use the word?
A quick review (paraphrased):
Me: "Theory means something different in science." You: "Come on, we both know what 'theory' means." Me: "Apparently we don't, or we wouldn't be having this discussion." You: "You don't know what a theory is, in the sense of "theory" the way people use the word?"...and that's where you changed the topic.
If you mean the common sense, I don't know why you brought it up or what its relevance is, because that's really not what we've been talking about. If you mean in the context of science, clearly one of us must be wrong, as we have contradictory views.
I'm not talking about some golden age where everything is good. On the other hand, yeah, things do get better and worse. We do have ages of enlightenment, dark ages, and times of madness.
Agreed. However, it's usually the case that things weren't as good as we remember, precisely because we remember things being better than they were.
Here's why it's required: I'm not going to readily accept a drastic and nonsensical redefinition of well-established words on the insistence of a poor thinker.
False dichotomy, then -- either someone's a "great thinker" or they're a "poor thinker"? Is that what you think?
The only way you get out of this is if you're calling me a "poor thinker", but that would be an ad-hom and not really relevant at all.
I'm not interested in accepting the redefinition of the word "theory" by someone who has never had a worthwhile theory of their own and who doesn't understand their own redefinition of the word.
In what way don't I understand my redefinition of the word? And on what grounds do you make the assumption that I've "never had a worthwhile theory," no matter whose definition of "theory" we accept?
You're talking about people failing to understand ideas behind actual terms in their normal/traditional meanings.
Do you mean to imply that the physics concept of work, energy, and power are the ideas behind the terms? I think you may have that backwards -- We had concepts of work, energy, and power in their "normal/traditional" sense long before we had any sort of sense of them in physics. You seem to be implying the same thing by the use of the word "traditional" here.
It seems clear that these words were used to identify related concepts in physics which did not yet have a word. Yet somehow, we don't have people like you insisting that we refer to power as dW/dt to distinguish it from "power" as in "That's a powerful man!"
you're talking about a metaphor about things where color doesnt apply, used in a highly technical setting.
Color doesn't apply, right. And if you understand that, you're in a category of people who understand something about how color works and where it applies -- that is, you already have some of the required background.
If you never really understood what color was, or what causes it, you would have no reason to automatically assume that it means something dramatically and arbitrarily different in the context of quantum physics.
You don't have pompous asshole quantum physicists trying to redefine "color" to mean "texture" in general conversations about any small object...
Do you really want me to pick this apart?
To start with, texture and color both have well-understood meanings for a small object. It isn't as if we were lacking a word for "texture". What word would you use for a well-established explanation which has sufficient evidence that we'd regard it as a "Scientific Theory" consistent with the definition used by the US National Academy of Sciences?
Even if something like this were necessary, it seems "hue" might be a better choice than "c
that's not any ad hominem, it's just an observation
It's at best wildly off-topic and unsubstantiated.
However, you are most definitely attacking me instead of my arguments, which is the definition of ad-hom. The only mistake you haven't made (yet) is to tell me that I'm wrong because of these things you assume about my mental state, so it's not actually fallacious.
But why should I take anything you say seriously if you not only can't back them up, but you react to any criticism with "chill out"? In what context do you expect that to actually work?
THAT is loaded with fallacies, if you want to go that road.
Or it's just an observation.
I may be working from a faulty assumption, but my understanding of what it means to be a libertarian is that it's a nearly unattainable ideal of what constitutes a free market and a small government.
The rest - you are just a social retard and have trouble parsing sentences.
Then why are you the one modded troll? Why am I the one with people coming to my defense?
Please, tell me where I've actually misunderstood what you're trying to do.
Really, we both know what the word "theory" means...
Apparently not.
Regarding the 75 years, people have lost their minds in the past few decades.
I think it's far more likely that you have some sort of rosy-colored hindsight for the "good old days," which never really existed. It's not just this context, it's not likely to be true for any field. Music and movies are a great example -- the reason so many old movies we have are "classics" is no one wants to keep them around otherwise, unless they're so spectacularly bad that they're worth preserving for that reason alone (Plan 9 From Outer Space).
I don't think you'd be able to come up with a genuinely great thinker of any time who would make the distinction that you're trying to,
I'm not sure why this is required. Do I need a "great thinker" to tell me that work has a different meaning in physics than it does elsewhere? Do I need a "great thinker" to tell me that the "color" of a quark has nothing to do with the colors we actually see in everyday life?
In fact, can you find one who explicitly supports either of those ideas?
Anyway, this definition of "theory" that you're using is a bad one,
How so?
doesn't have a basis in anything,
Found a basis in a few minutes of idle Googling. Here's another. Or, more seriously, how about this one?
Now, your turn. What's the basis for your assertion that "people have lost their minds in the past few decades"? And this definition of "scientific theory" isn't at all obscure, so where are the thousands of dissenting scientists?
is going to be needlessly confusing for people.
People are also easily confused by the definitions in physics of work, energy, and power. They're also easily confused by the term "Big Bang", suggesting that something exploded.
Of course, somehow most people manage to figure out what people are talking about when they say "Evolution" in the biological sense compared to "evolution" in other contexts -- for instance, talking about the "evolution" of a product line, where there's hardly been artificial selection, let alone natural selection.
Words can have different definitions in different contexts, and that's fine. In this case, the definition I've given for "theory" is a useful one.
The original forefathers including your favorite, Thomas Jefferson, even said that Christianity has the best values for our country to follow.
Actually, Franklin was my favorite.
And, in fact, Thomas Jefferson said several things which might be relevant: "Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law." That's in addition to the potentially misleading "the Christian philosophy - the most sublime and benevolent, but most perverted system that ever shone on man..."
You'll note that the only mention of religion of any kind in the Constitution and in all 27 amendments is in the First Amendment, which establishes that "Wall of Separation," and in the main body of the Constitution, to explicitly prevent any religious test for public office. If they really wanted this to be a Christian nation, why is the word "Christian" -- let alone "Christ", "Creator", "Jesus", or "God" -- entirely missing from the founding document they wrote to define this nation?
It does matter where he was born based upon the constitution.
And my question is why this matters, in general.
Since you don't know the actual rules,
I know the rules. I'm questioning why it mattered in the first place -- why was "natural born citizen" ever part of the rules? What relevance can it possibly have to how well someone serves the office of the POTUS?
If your claim is that it only matters because it's in the rules, fine, but that's kind of circular and would tend to suggest the rules should be amended.
He's done interesting things for sure, however, not in the best benefit for this country.
How is this relevant to anything we were discussing?
Would this be a bunch of "pedantic douchebags"? Definition 1 is "well-substantiated."
How about Wikipedia? "It is supported by many strands of evidence, rather than a single foundation, ensuring it is probably a good approximation, if not totally correct."
There's nothing political about it -- words have different definitions in different contexts. In particular, "work" has a massively different context in physics than it does in everyday life. Why would I expect the word "theory", no matter how "well-established" it might be in the common sense, to have the same meaning in the context of science?
As far as politics, it seems to me that the scientists who actually use the term are less likely to be political than the Creationists who want to redefine or deliberately misunderstand it so they can dismiss Evolution as "just a theory."
My understanding is that US patents have a finite lifetime, so while Oracle can basically squash Java development until they expire, there's nothing that can stop OpenJDK's implementation of SE6 from being entirely unencumbered in 2026. And that's if there are patents they filed immediately on releasing SE6 -- for instance, if there are any patents from the initial release of Java, those should be gone within five years.
Whenever the patents expire, it will be at least theoretically possible to fork Java entirely -- just pick a version of OpenJDK that's unencumbered, fork it, and work towards whatever standard and test suite you like.
Spoken like someone who knows less than nothing about evolution.
Here's a trivial example: Find me fossil bunny in the Cambrian layer and you've just disproved evolution, and you'll likely get all sorts of awards very quickly (Nobel Prize, etc.)
Another trivial example: Just about anything a Creationist thinks evolution means. For instance, if we really did see a Crocaduck, that would pretty much be the end of the theory.
And yes, evolution makes testable claims. You can look at any of the phylogenetic trees -- and note that completely independent lines of evidence lead to pretty nearly identical phylogenetic trees -- and work out what kind of transitional forms you might expect, and where you might expect them -- and this has been done. People have pointed to a specific transition that looked particularly interesting, worked out exactly what it would look like and where they expected to find it, then they went there and dug up exactly what they were looking for.
All of that is working with your assumption that evolution isn't something which can be duplicated in the lab -- but speciation and single-celled to multi-cellular transitions have been observed.
Whether or not you accept the definition of "theory" that GP wants to use, evolution is one of the most well-supported theories in modern science, and that's despite generations of scientists who desperately did not want to believe it was true.
But hey, if you have a better explanation -- one you can use to predict where the next fossil will be found, what it will look like, etc -- go ahead. Again, the Nobel Prize awaits.
You may be confusing the colloquial "theory" with the scientific definition of a theory.
Unless I've been very, very misinformed, scientific theories that are actually worth calling theories are things which began as mere ideas, formed testable hypotheses, and have been rigorously tested and re-tested.
As you might not know, It matters because you have to be born in the united states to be eligible to be president. Its not "important" in any practical sense, but its in the "rules".
I do know that, and I may not have been clear, but that was entirely my point -- why is it in the rules? If you were writing the rules, why would you ever include anything like this?
I am a libertarian and I can't stand any other approach... definitely not free market oriented at all
Well, you're a Libertarian. No one is free-market-oriented enough for you.
Obama is actually not very socially liberal
"We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, and a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers."
In what way is that not socially liberal? I guess the conservatives haven't set the bar very high, but he has explicitly acknowledged atheists repeatedly, while everyone else, even democrats, do everything they can to distance themselves from even the rumor that they might maybe have met with some of them once to see what they had to say.
Maybe he is a Muslim/atheist/communist/fascist/Maoist/devil worshiper
You realize at least three of those are contradictory, right? There's no "maybe" about it -- he cannot possibly be all of those things.
born in Kenya,
He was born in Hawaii.
Not that it matters. What, exactly, does that change? Is there some mystical essence of American-ism that children are endowed with in their first ten seconds of life outside of mommy? The fact that this was an issue at all is beyond absurd.
I kind of hope he is all of those things at once, at least that would be interesting.
If you think he hasn't done anything interesting, you really haven't been paying attention.
I'm guessing you were being sarcastic through at least some of this, but it's hard to tell where. I guess I accept the whoosh if it's coming, but really...
So the choice is to believe an unproved and likely irrational concept called "God"...
Or to believe an unproved and likely irrational concept called "luck"?
Yeah, I'd say he's "lucky" in the colloquial sense, but to believe some people being "lucky" is an indication of future results, or that outliers (lucky or unlucky) prove anything other than that statistics works?
I guess you provide a valuable service by not understanding statistics. If people actually had the first clue, no one would be buying lottery tickets -- and instead of thanking God, you'd be thanking someone who is actually real and actually had an impact on saving your life -- like a doctor!
While there is some truth to that, there are two huge problems I have with VBA:
First, Windows-only is a deal-breaker for me.
Second, it doesn't really seem to have a niche other than helping people move from Excel to "real" programming, which, as you know, leads to atrocities. You identified another fairly irrelevant niche: People who only have a compiler and no libraries, which kind of implies non-programmers.
I mean, that's kind of like saying, VBA is good for when you're too fucking lazy to download Python. Same thing: VBA is good for when you're too fucking lazy to download a library. Obviously, if you're not willing to download something, whatever's pre-installed on your computer wins. Except I'm not even sure this is valid -- don't you have to download an SDK anyway? Then what's your point?
I'm also not entirely sure why you're only comparing it to Python. JRuby, for instance, has native Java access (seriously, you don't have to write a single line of Java code, you can just call Java objects from Ruby), and RubyInline provides inline C/C++ for Ruby and JRuby. I have to imagine Python has similar things.
If my Ruby app is pure Ruby, of if it's pure JRuby+Java, I can create a Jar that runs anywhere Java does. If it includes inline C, it's likely I can still compile it anywhere without needing to port anything myself. A VBA app would require a complete rewrite.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? You don't know what a "theory" is, in the sense of "theory" the way people use the word?
A quick review (paraphrased):
Me: "Theory means something different in science." ...and that's where you changed the topic.
You: "Come on, we both know what 'theory' means."
Me: "Apparently we don't, or we wouldn't be having this discussion."
You: "You don't know what a theory is, in the sense of "theory" the way people use the word?"
If you mean the common sense, I don't know why you brought it up or what its relevance is, because that's really not what we've been talking about. If you mean in the context of science, clearly one of us must be wrong, as we have contradictory views.
I'm not talking about some golden age where everything is good. On the other hand, yeah, things do get better and worse. We do have ages of enlightenment, dark ages, and times of madness.
Agreed. However, it's usually the case that things weren't as good as we remember, precisely because we remember things being better than they were.
Here's why it's required: I'm not going to readily accept a drastic and nonsensical redefinition of well-established words on the insistence of a poor thinker.
False dichotomy, then -- either someone's a "great thinker" or they're a "poor thinker"? Is that what you think?
The only way you get out of this is if you're calling me a "poor thinker", but that would be an ad-hom and not really relevant at all.
I'm not interested in accepting the redefinition of the word "theory" by someone who has never had a worthwhile theory of their own and who doesn't understand their own redefinition of the word.
In what way don't I understand my redefinition of the word? And on what grounds do you make the assumption that I've "never had a worthwhile theory," no matter whose definition of "theory" we accept?
You're talking about people failing to understand ideas behind actual terms in their normal/traditional meanings.
Do you mean to imply that the physics concept of work, energy, and power are the ideas behind the terms? I think you may have that backwards -- We had concepts of work, energy, and power in their "normal/traditional" sense long before we had any sort of sense of them in physics. You seem to be implying the same thing by the use of the word "traditional" here.
It seems clear that these words were used to identify related concepts in physics which did not yet have a word. Yet somehow, we don't have people like you insisting that we refer to power as dW/dt to distinguish it from "power" as in "That's a powerful man!"
you're talking about a metaphor about things where color doesnt apply, used in a highly technical setting.
Color doesn't apply, right. And if you understand that, you're in a category of people who understand something about how color works and where it applies -- that is, you already have some of the required background.
If you never really understood what color was, or what causes it, you would have no reason to automatically assume that it means something dramatically and arbitrarily different in the context of quantum physics.
You don't have pompous asshole quantum physicists trying to redefine "color" to mean "texture" in general conversations about any small object...
Do you really want me to pick this apart?
To start with, texture and color both have well-understood meanings for a small object. It isn't as if we were lacking a word for "texture". What word would you use for a well-established explanation which has sufficient evidence that we'd regard it as a "Scientific Theory" consistent with the definition used by the US National Academy of Sciences?
Even if something like this were necessary, it seems "hue" might be a better choice than "c
that's not any ad hominem, it's just an observation
It's at best wildly off-topic and unsubstantiated.
However, you are most definitely attacking me instead of my arguments, which is the definition of ad-hom. The only mistake you haven't made (yet) is to tell me that I'm wrong because of these things you assume about my mental state, so it's not actually fallacious.
But why should I take anything you say seriously if you not only can't back them up, but you react to any criticism with "chill out"? In what context do you expect that to actually work?
THAT is loaded with fallacies, if you want to go that road.
Or it's just an observation.
I may be working from a faulty assumption, but my understanding of what it means to be a libertarian is that it's a nearly unattainable ideal of what constitutes a free market and a small government.
The rest - you are just a social retard and have trouble parsing sentences.
Then why are you the one modded troll? Why am I the one with people coming to my defense?
Please, tell me where I've actually misunderstood what you're trying to do.
Really, we both know what the word "theory" means...
Apparently not.
Regarding the 75 years, people have lost their minds in the past few decades.
I think it's far more likely that you have some sort of rosy-colored hindsight for the "good old days," which never really existed. It's not just this context, it's not likely to be true for any field. Music and movies are a great example -- the reason so many old movies we have are "classics" is no one wants to keep them around otherwise, unless they're so spectacularly bad that they're worth preserving for that reason alone (Plan 9 From Outer Space).
I don't think you'd be able to come up with a genuinely great thinker of any time who would make the distinction that you're trying to,
I'm not sure why this is required. Do I need a "great thinker" to tell me that work has a different meaning in physics than it does elsewhere? Do I need a "great thinker" to tell me that the "color" of a quark has nothing to do with the colors we actually see in everyday life?
In fact, can you find one who explicitly supports either of those ideas?
Anyway, this definition of "theory" that you're using is a bad one,
How so?
doesn't have a basis in anything,
Found a basis in a few minutes of idle Googling. Here's another. Or, more seriously, how about this one?
Now, your turn. What's the basis for your assertion that "people have lost their minds in the past few decades"? And this definition of "scientific theory" isn't at all obscure, so where are the thousands of dissenting scientists?
is going to be needlessly confusing for people.
People are also easily confused by the definitions in physics of work, energy, and power. They're also easily confused by the term "Big Bang", suggesting that something exploded.
Of course, somehow most people manage to figure out what people are talking about when they say "Evolution" in the biological sense compared to "evolution" in other contexts -- for instance, talking about the "evolution" of a product line, where there's hardly been artificial selection, let alone natural selection.
Words can have different definitions in different contexts, and that's fine. In this case, the definition I've given for "theory" is a useful one.
Second ad-hom. Guess you can't.
The original forefathers including your favorite, Thomas Jefferson, even said that Christianity has the best values for our country to follow.
Actually, Franklin was my favorite.
And, in fact, Thomas Jefferson said several things which might be relevant: "Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law." That's in addition to the potentially misleading "the Christian philosophy - the most sublime and benevolent, but most perverted system that ever shone on man..."
You'll note that the only mention of religion of any kind in the Constitution and in all 27 amendments is in the First Amendment, which establishes that "Wall of Separation," and in the main body of the Constitution, to explicitly prevent any religious test for public office. If they really wanted this to be a Christian nation, why is the word "Christian" -- let alone "Christ", "Creator", "Jesus", or "God" -- entirely missing from the founding document they wrote to define this nation?
It does matter where he was born based upon the constitution.
And my question is why this matters, in general.
Since you don't know the actual rules,
I know the rules. I'm questioning why it mattered in the first place -- why was "natural born citizen" ever part of the rules? What relevance can it possibly have to how well someone serves the office of the POTUS?
If your claim is that it only matters because it's in the rules, fine, but that's kind of circular and would tend to suggest the rules should be amended.
He's done interesting things for sure, however, not in the best benefit for this country.
How is this relevant to anything we were discussing?
And yet, not all of these things are mutually exclusive, only some of them.
My citations are vague. Yours are as yet nonexistent.
And 75 years? That's an odd constraint. What does the amount of time have to do with it?
Would this be a bunch of "pedantic douchebags"? Definition 1 is "well-substantiated."
How about Wikipedia? "It is supported by many strands of evidence, rather than a single foundation, ensuring it is probably a good approximation, if not totally correct."
There's nothing political about it -- words have different definitions in different contexts. In particular, "work" has a massively different context in physics than it does in everyday life. Why would I expect the word "theory", no matter how "well-established" it might be in the common sense, to have the same meaning in the context of science?
As far as politics, it seems to me that the scientists who actually use the term are less likely to be political than the Creationists who want to redefine or deliberately misunderstand it so they can dismiss Evolution as "just a theory."
Anyway, your turn: Citation needed.
Erm, who said anything about 25 years?
And while languages do evolve, even COBOL is still around, LISP still has features no one else does, C really hasn't changed, and C++ barely has.
I'd be curious when those patents expire...
My understanding is that US patents have a finite lifetime, so while Oracle can basically squash Java development until they expire, there's nothing that can stop OpenJDK's implementation of SE6 from being entirely unencumbered in 2026. And that's if there are patents they filed immediately on releasing SE6 -- for instance, if there are any patents from the initial release of Java, those should be gone within five years.
Whenever the patents expire, it will be at least theoretically possible to fork Java entirely -- just pick a version of OpenJDK that's unencumbered, fork it, and work towards whatever standard and test suite you like.
Citation needed.
Unless you're claiming Android isn't currently based on Java?
Spoken like someone who knows less than nothing about evolution.
Here's a trivial example: Find me fossil bunny in the Cambrian layer and you've just disproved evolution, and you'll likely get all sorts of awards very quickly (Nobel Prize, etc.)
Another trivial example: Just about anything a Creationist thinks evolution means. For instance, if we really did see a Crocaduck, that would pretty much be the end of the theory.
And yes, evolution makes testable claims. You can look at any of the phylogenetic trees -- and note that completely independent lines of evidence lead to pretty nearly identical phylogenetic trees -- and work out what kind of transitional forms you might expect, and where you might expect them -- and this has been done. People have pointed to a specific transition that looked particularly interesting, worked out exactly what it would look like and where they expected to find it, then they went there and dug up exactly what they were looking for.
All of that is working with your assumption that evolution isn't something which can be duplicated in the lab -- but speciation and single-celled to multi-cellular transitions have been observed.
Whether or not you accept the definition of "theory" that GP wants to use, evolution is one of the most well-supported theories in modern science, and that's despite generations of scientists who desperately did not want to believe it was true.
But hey, if you have a better explanation -- one you can use to predict where the next fossil will be found, what it will look like, etc -- go ahead. Again, the Nobel Prize awaits.
You may be confusing the colloquial "theory" with the scientific definition of a theory.
Unless I've been very, very misinformed, scientific theories that are actually worth calling theories are things which began as mere ideas, formed testable hypotheses, and have been rigorously tested and re-tested.
As you might not know, It matters because you have to be born in the united states to be eligible to be president. Its not "important" in any practical sense, but its in the "rules".
I do know that, and I may not have been clear, but that was entirely my point -- why is it in the rules? If you were writing the rules, why would you ever include anything like this?
The location of birth matters because it's tied to the requirements for the office of President.
But that's exactly my point -- why is this a requirement? Why should it be a requirement for anything, let alone the office of the POTUS?
So much for "All men are created equal..."
Ad-hominem.
Whatever my mental state, can you actually respond to anything I just said?
I am a libertarian and I can't stand any other approach... definitely not free market oriented at all
Well, you're a Libertarian. No one is free-market-oriented enough for you.
Obama is actually not very socially liberal
"We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, and a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers."
In what way is that not socially liberal? I guess the conservatives haven't set the bar very high, but he has explicitly acknowledged atheists repeatedly, while everyone else, even democrats, do everything they can to distance themselves from even the rumor that they might maybe have met with some of them once to see what they had to say.
Maybe he is a Muslim/atheist/communist/fascist/Maoist/devil worshiper
You realize at least three of those are contradictory, right? There's no "maybe" about it -- he cannot possibly be all of those things.
born in Kenya,
He was born in Hawaii.
Not that it matters. What, exactly, does that change? Is there some mystical essence of American-ism that children are endowed with in their first ten seconds of life outside of mommy? The fact that this was an issue at all is beyond absurd.
I kind of hope he is all of those things at once, at least that would be interesting.
If you think he hasn't done anything interesting, you really haven't been paying attention.
I'm guessing you were being sarcastic through at least some of this, but it's hard to tell where. I guess I accept the whoosh if it's coming, but really...
That doesn't seem too strange -- it's just a question of whether you'd rather chord or type multiple characters.
I mean, I use shift like everyone else, but using caps isn't necessarily an indication that the person is stupid, just quirky.
No, I wasn't disputing the existence of sick days.
But the fact that people are abusing their sick days, thus causing issues when they're actually sick, suggests people need more time off overall.
...why?
Call them "mental health days."
Compromise:
Provide enough vacation days and "personal days" that people aren't tempted to use their sick days, too.
Erm...
So the choice is to believe an unproved and likely irrational concept called "God"...
Or to believe an unproved and likely irrational concept called "luck"?
Yeah, I'd say he's "lucky" in the colloquial sense, but to believe some people being "lucky" is an indication of future results, or that outliers (lucky or unlucky) prove anything other than that statistics works?
I guess you provide a valuable service by not understanding statistics. If people actually had the first clue, no one would be buying lottery tickets -- and instead of thanking God, you'd be thanking someone who is actually real and actually had an impact on saving your life -- like a doctor!
Also worth mentioning, she's evacuating just like everyone else.
Exactly what is she trusting God with?
Let's not forget, God apparently didn't protect the gardener.
While there is some truth to that, there are two huge problems I have with VBA:
First, Windows-only is a deal-breaker for me.
Second, it doesn't really seem to have a niche other than helping people move from Excel to "real" programming, which, as you know, leads to atrocities. You identified another fairly irrelevant niche: People who only have a compiler and no libraries, which kind of implies non-programmers.
I mean, that's kind of like saying, VBA is good for when you're too fucking lazy to download Python. Same thing: VBA is good for when you're too fucking lazy to download a library. Obviously, if you're not willing to download something, whatever's pre-installed on your computer wins. Except I'm not even sure this is valid -- don't you have to download an SDK anyway? Then what's your point?
I'm also not entirely sure why you're only comparing it to Python. JRuby, for instance, has native Java access (seriously, you don't have to write a single line of Java code, you can just call Java objects from Ruby), and RubyInline provides inline C/C++ for Ruby and JRuby. I have to imagine Python has similar things.
If my Ruby app is pure Ruby, of if it's pure JRuby+Java, I can create a Jar that runs anywhere Java does. If it includes inline C, it's likely I can still compile it anywhere without needing to port anything myself. A VBA app would require a complete rewrite.