Confessions of a Python fanboy

[Tim Rowe]

2009/7/30 r <rt8396 at gmail.com>:
>
> Like your
> first lay, your first programing language can leave an indelible mark
> on you

That's true. FOCAL scarred me for life.

> but i now realize Ruby has some good
> things going for it.

Any language that gets any sort of real use has to have. For instance,
I love Ada's numeric types (you can specify either the minimum number
of significant figures or the maximum delta for a real type, and it
will give you a type that satisfies that -- or a compilation error if
it can't.  That matches genuine problem domains far better than having
to remember how many bits in a double on this particular system, and
reduces portability bugs).

> 3.) true OOP
> Now before you go and get all "huffy" over this statement, hear me
> out. Python is the best language in the world. But it damn sure has
> some warts! "len(this)" instead of "obj.length" max(that) instead of
> [1,2,3,4,5].max(). You know what i am talking about here people. We
> all get complacent and It seems easier to just cope with these
> problems instead of fighting for change. But look at the French,  WHAT
> THE HELL HAS THAT DONE FOR THEM, *NOTHING*!!!!

I seem to recall recent studies showing that the French were on
average happier than Brits or Americans. Don't knock it!

> As for the rest of Ruby, i am not impressed. The redundant usage of
> "end" over indention perplexes me. The Perlish feel of "require" and
> the horrifically cryptic idioms of Ruby regular expressions. The
> "puts" and "gets" seem childish and the math class does not even have
> a degrees or radians function!

The operating system dependency built into the language did it for me.
That and the fact that I couldn't stop laughing for long enough to
learn any more when I read in the Pragmatic Programmer's Guide that
"Ruby, unlike less flexible languages, lets you alter the value of a
constant." Yep, as they say "Bug" = "Undocumented feature"!

-- 
Tim Rowe