Coming of age...

[Jason Voegele]

m.faassen at vet.uu.nl (Martijn Faassen) wrote in message news:<a4bu3r$ic8$1 at newshost.accu.uu.nl>...
> Andrew MacIntyre <andymac at bullseye.apana.org.au> wrote:
> > On 12 Feb 2002, Martijn Faassen wrote:
>  
> >> Another interesting thing the other day is that on comp.object someone
> >> was asking which language they should try to experiment with OO, and
> >> there came lots of suggestions to use Ruby (Python was in there, but Ruby was
> >> mentioned a *lot*). Seems that language has been crossing a barrier
> >> as well recently.
>  
> > My take: Ruby turns out to be a language of refuge for escapees from Perl
> > who can't cope with white-space significance (more of them than not, I
> > expect).
> 
> That doesn't explain the recommendations in comp.object, though. 
> They use smalltalk, Java, C++ yes, but I don't expect most of the people
> there are Perl users at all.

Yes, I can attest to the fact that not all Ruby programmers come from
Perl.  I use Python and Ruby fairly regularly, and my background is
Pascal -> C -> C++ -> Java -> Eiffel -> (Smalltalk, Ruby, and Python).

I've used Perl in the past, but never considered myself a "Perl guy". 
I can also attest to the fact that lots of Ruby programmers don't even
*like* Perl ;-)  The similarities between Ruby and Perl are only
skin-deep.  A lot of people like it for its semantic similarity with
Smalltalk, rather than its syntactic similarity to Perl.

In any event, I suspect that popularity of either Ruby or Python will
be mutually beneficial to the other.  Once one of them "crosses the
line", it won't be so hard for the other to do the same.

Jason Voegele