I scanned the responses to this article and am incredibly perplexed. I can't seem to find a single "on-topic" comment; All commentaries are whiney political diatribes that re-hash what Bush, Clinton, Gore, Eisenhower, et. al. did or didn't do about a wide range of irrelevant (to this post) topics from Iran-Contra to Saddam Hussein to Occidental Petroleum. (who comes under fire next, Teddy Roosevelt for San Juan Hill?)
My goodness people, focus on the darn issues here...
What do these restrictions and closures mean?
Clearly, this action by the present U.S. Administration is an assault on freedom of information access to publicly funded libraries.
Who benefits?
Who loses?
What's being hidden and Why?
Given the track record of the curren folks in power to prevaricate and spin, thie just sounds very wrong to me
Warmly thanking you for the moov URL reference. It's certainly one of the best dynamic bake-offs I have yet seen. Although primarily a Python programmer, I came away with a reasoned and (I believe) impartial assessment from someone with no axe to grind. I certainly agree with the overall assessment that Java does not provide a decent basis for web enabling the user experience.
It certainly proivided a full course meal and very little evangelising. Thanks again for pointing this one out
Re:Someone please tell me what I gain over Python?
on
RAD with Ruby
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· Score: 1
I am not uncomfortable in Ruby. In fact I am associate tech director of a large DARPA project whose test and evaluation environment is completely implemented in Ruby.
My concerns are indeed that overloads and other cryptic symbology (access levels for attibutes, PERL-esque conventions) make Ruby somewhat less readable than Python, especially at a first read. I would contend that fewer symbological transform required by the reader mean less to be forgotten or misunderstood.
My real concerns (from my 4 year involvement in one of the largest practical deployments done completely in Ruby), are more that Ruby is less mature and stable in many cases (the Ruby thread model and lack of a free, useful GUI lib come to mind).
Many time, when I am racing toward a solution, I don't want to be bothered with inventing for the first time (or re-inventing) an algorithm or a library. Perhaps that is just the Pragmatic Programmer in me (apologies to Mssrs Thomas and Hunt). Perhaps as you suggest, it's just a matter for personal preference.
At ant rate Dave, I found you barbed comments enjoyable; both witty and insightful. As an aside, I believe that we in the agile languages community have more things tht unite us than divide us. My personal crusade is to open more people up to agile languages in general (see my JavaOne presentations on Scripting Languages and Java, in both 2002 and 2004).
Re:Someone please tell me what I gain over Python?
on
RAD with Ruby
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· Score: 1
Dave, of course I have heard of CPAN. Have you seen RubyGems -- an attempt at doing it one better.
GVR's response, when asked why no "CPAN for Python" says (perhaps tongue-in-cheek?) that it's because Python is already batteries included (i.e., more complete out of the box ) and doesn't really need a CPAN equivalent. That may or may not be true, but don't shoot the messenger for delivering the comment.
As far as the acid test comment, yeah, you're probably right. The number of third party libs is only a measure of popularity. Perhaps I could make the case to you that popularity is a classical weak measure of other important atributes of a language, such as useability, programmer productivity, joy of programming, ease of refactoring, code clarity, etc.
Thanks for the insightful comment
Re:Someone please tell me what I gain over Python?
on
RAD with Ruby
·
· Score: 1
I tend to agree with the writer's comments, even though they may draw some flames. As an extremely satisfied Python user, I find daily delight in using the robust, efficient O-O featues of Python, and still feel that syntactically Ruby is a bit ugly. I find some new treasure in the Python trove almost daily as well. In fact , the Python cornucopia runneth over so much that there's even a daily newspaper of the Python universe : http://www.pythonware.com/daily/ (usual disclaimer: I am not assocated in any way with...)
In touting Ruby, a respondent will invariably trot out list comprehension in Python and then suggest that blocks in Ruby are more asthetically pleasing, never mentioned that:
List comprehension is sort of philosophically deprecated in Python and
Generators serve the same function in Python as blocks do in Ruby, albeit with even more transparency/clarity/asthetic beauty in Python than in Ruby.
One of the acid tests for a language (certainly not the only one, but a really big one for journeyman developers) is the number of ready to roll third party libraries available to enable the language to create sophisticated and ready to deploy applications using only the language itself . Here, IMO, Python is unequalled by almost anything else.
Every time I look longingly at some other language (Groovy, Judoscript, ECMAScript, Ruby) I find it deficient aong some important dimension. (e.g., Groovy has a heavy dependency on Java, Ruby is immature and has a weak GUI story and a lot of roll-your-own aspects, and so on)
Slashdot Mirror
-
What do these restrictions and closures mean?
-
Clearly, this action by the present U.S. Administration is an assault on freedom of information access to publicly funded libraries.
-
Who benefits?
-
Who loses?
-
What's being hidden and Why?
Given the track record of the curren folks in power to prevaricate and spin, thie just sounds very wrong to meIt certainly proivided a full course meal and very little evangelising. Thanks again for pointing this one out
My concerns are indeed that overloads and other cryptic symbology (access levels for attibutes, PERL-esque conventions) make Ruby somewhat less readable than Python, especially at a first read. I would contend that fewer symbological transform required by the reader mean less to be forgotten or misunderstood.
My real concerns (from my 4 year involvement in one of the largest practical deployments done completely in Ruby), are more that Ruby is less mature and stable in many cases (the Ruby thread model and lack of a free, useful GUI lib come to mind).
Many time, when I am racing toward a solution, I don't want to be bothered with inventing for the first time (or re-inventing) an algorithm or a library. Perhaps that is just the Pragmatic Programmer in me (apologies to Mssrs Thomas and Hunt). Perhaps as you suggest, it's just a matter for personal preference.
At ant rate Dave, I found you barbed comments enjoyable; both witty and insightful. As an aside, I believe that we in the agile languages community have more things tht unite us than divide us. My personal crusade is to open more people up to agile languages in general (see my JavaOne presentations on Scripting Languages and Java, in both 2002 and 2004).
As far as the acid test comment, yeah, you're probably right. The number of third party libs is only a measure of popularity. Perhaps I could make the case to you that popularity is a classical weak measure of other important atributes of a language, such as useability, programmer productivity, joy of programming, ease of refactoring, code clarity, etc. Thanks for the insightful comment
I tend to agree with the writer's comments, even though they may draw some flames. As an extremely satisfied Python user, I find daily delight in using the robust, efficient O-O featues of Python, and still feel that syntactically Ruby is a bit ugly. I find some new treasure in the Python trove almost daily as well. In fact , the Python cornucopia runneth over so much that there's even a daily newspaper of the Python universe : http://www.pythonware.com/daily/ (usual disclaimer: I am not assocated in any way with ...)
In touting Ruby, a respondent will invariably trot out list comprehension in Python and then suggest that blocks in Ruby are more asthetically pleasing, never mentioned that:
One of the acid tests for a language (certainly not the only one, but a really big one for journeyman developers) is the number of ready to roll third party libraries available to enable the language to create sophisticated and ready to deploy applications using only the language itself . Here, IMO, Python is unequalled by almost anything else.
Every time I look longingly at some other language (Groovy, Judoscript, ECMAScript, Ruby) I find it deficient aong some important dimension. (e.g., Groovy has a heavy dependency on Java, Ruby is immature and has a weak GUI story and a lot of roll-your-own aspects, and so on)