Programming Languages
Reply #25 – 2005-11-09 18:09:15
These days I'm much more taken with the "scripting" languages, particularly Ruby. Very practical, cleanly organized, none of the complexity of static typing etc. While i as well am mostly interested in this kind of languages, i disagree that ruby is cleanly organized - sure, it has achieved alot without a single revamp, but even matt now agrees that it is suffering from growing pains, that some of its behaviour (like local vars) is weird and that some of its syntax for advanced features like hashes, keyword-arguments, etc. are plainly unnecessary complicated. I'm very interested in how RITE/ruby2 will turn out - but then again, currently they seem to lack the necessary manpower to do it.... and i fear ruby2 may become something like duke nukem forever ;) What, however, i'm more afraid of, is that in all those plans for ruby2 and its syntax-redesign, no single word was mentioned on the topic nested namespaces... i consider the :: notation the most ugly piece of ruby's syntax. And dont get me started about the limitations and unnecessary complicated creation and handling of nested namespaces. So, i do like ruby alot - coding with it overally is just "fun"... it feels intuitive. I completely agree with the intro of the pragmatic programmers guide to ruby - it brings back the fun into coding. Unfortunatelly however, i don't consider ruby to be ready yet.... the overall concept and philosophy behind it are great, but it needs a revamp and polishing to be ready. Take the roadmap-features of ruby2, RITE, and namespace/module-handling as it is done in python, and it would be my dream-language.