Decline and fall of scripting languages ?

[Kay Schluehr]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> Cliff Wells <cliff at develix.com> writes:
> > It didn't say what they left PHP, Perl and Python for (if you are to
> > even believe their findings).
> >
> > PHP has been losing programmers in droves... to Ruby on Rails, but I'm
> > not sure how that is bad news for scripting-language fans.
>
> That's the second time in one or two days that I've heard Ruby on
> Rails mentioned.  Can anyone here post a paragraph or two description?
> I sort of know what Ruby is, a very OOP-ified Perl-resemblant
> language, that's also implemented only as an interpreter.  I can't see
> punting Python for it.

Exacly. While Pythons main attitude is reducing clutter and redundant
design while staying within an OO mindframe, Ruby reintroduces perlish
clutter. Ruby was mentioned to be a more clean OO language than Python
in times where Python didn't support inheritance from builtins.
Nowadays anonymus blocks are the single most discriminative feature
Ruby is praised for. Therefore Ruby seems to be more modern than Python
to some people allthough it's design concept is reactionary - or
"postmodern" what may be the same in post-postmodern times ;-)

> Lately I'm interested in OCAML as a possible step up from Python.  It
> has bogosity of its own (much of it syntactic) but it has static
> typing and a serious compiler, from what I understand.  I don't think
> I can grok it from just reading the online tutorial; I'm going to have
> to code something in it, once I get a block of time available.  Any
> thoughts?

The whole ML family ( including OCaml ) and languages like Haskell
based on a Hindley-Milnor type system clearly make a difference. I
would say that those languages are also cutting edge in language theory
research. It should be definitely interesting to you. Since there is no
single language implementation you might also find one that supports
concepts you need most e.g. concurrency:

http://cml.cs.uchicago.edu/

Regards,
Kay