Corel + Borland = The End of MS Win

[Paul Robinson]

Paul Boddie wrote:
> 
> thucdat1143 at my-deja.com wrote:
> > Check this out: www.ruby-lang.org to see what IBM is talking about Ruby.
> 
> The IBM article [1] is rather amusing. At every point of comparison between
> Ruby, Python and Perl, examples of Ruby and Perl, but not Python, are given to
> "demonstrate" Ruby's syntactic superiority.

I received the following from the author of that article (in reply to
the message below).

Most interesting quote:
"""I thought it was pretty clear that the
difference between python and Ruby - at this point - is largely one of
taste
and aesthetics."""
 - that's not the impression that I got from reading that article!!

Dear Mr. Robinson,
I'm sorry you did not like my article and I appreciate the comments and
understand your concerns.  The intent of the article was not to
misleadingly
sell Ruby over either Python or Perl, but to get people excited over a
new
language that has a lot to offer.  I thought it was pretty clear that
the
difference between python and Ruby - at this point - is largely one of
taste
and aesthetics.  But you are right, the comments ought to have been
backed
up with more concrete examples.  Thanks for your input,
Sincerely,
Maya Stodte

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Robinson [mailto:paul.robinson at quantisci.co.uk]
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2000 12:07 PM
To: mstodte at pop.mail.rcn.net
Subject: Perl, Python and Ruby

Dear Madam,

Re your article, "Ruby: a new language" (
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/ruby.html ).

I was disappointed with your article that promised comparison between
Ruby, Perl and Python.
I felt the article was unnecessarily biased towards Ruby (and more
particularly against Python).

Is there a reason that there were no code examples of Python? It would
seem that to keep the mood of the article in favour of Ruby they were
left out.

I would also like to address some of your statements (of fact?)
regarding Python.

"Ruby does not access object attributes by default as Python sometimes
does."
Could you explain that point please? I do not understand this.

"Ruby's functions and methods, unlike Python's, are not first class
objects."
First class functions and methods are good thing, aren't they?

"Ruby converts small integers and long integers automatically;"
This could be considered a "bad (TM)" feature.

"Though it is rarely claimed that Ruby is more powerful than Python,
Ruby is faster, more natural, more elegant, and increasingly more
popular."
I would like to hear the justification behind these points.

Thanks for your time,
        Paul Robinson (Python Developer (in case you didn't guess))

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