How does Ruby compare to Python?? How good is DESIGN of Ruby compared to Python?

[Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes]

A.M. Kuchling <amk at amk.ca>
wrote on Fri, 27 Feb 2004 07:42:42 -0600:
> On 27 Feb 2004 10:36:39 +0200, 
> 	Ville Vainio <ville at spammers.com> wrote:
>> If you are jonesing for a new language to play with, you could as well
>> play with Lisp. At least you would learn something new.
> That's pretty much my reaction to Ruby, too.  It's kind of neat, and if I
> was a Perl person I'd go use Ruby instead of waiting for Perl 6, but it
> isn't so different from the existing scripting languages.

  The primary virtue of Perl used to be that it was the only language
with decent regexp support.  But now everyone has good regexp support.

>  If your interest
> is in learning new ways of programming that turn your head around, you'd
> need to look farther afield (Haskell, ML, Lisp, etc.).

  And I'd second either OCaml or Haskell as good languages if you want
to learn something new, while still being useful for real work.  Pure ML
is rather awful to do real work in, though it can be done if you're
sufficiently functional-minded.  OCaml is a pragmatic compromise of ML
with programming reality.  Haskell, too, is a fairly pragmatic design.
I don't think you should deploy either one where someone else might have
to maintain your code, but they're educational.

  Self would be another good educational language, but its current
implementation is not very portable.

-- 
 <a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"Doing the impossible makes us mighty." -Captain Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly