Re[4]: Perl is evil, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ruby, Python is the way to go!

[Giuseppe Bilotta <gip.bilotta@iol.it>]

Thursday, July 18, 2002 Ed L Cashin wrote:

ELC> I shared your hesitations regarding Python.  When I heard about ruby
ELC> it seemed too good to be true, and I kept thinking that I wouldn't
ELC> ever prefer ruby to perl because it wouldn't have such-and-such
ELC> feature, but the more I learned about it the more impressed I was.  I
ELC> now do prefer ruby.  

ELC> While it's easy to use perl in a clean way, it's easier in ruby, and
ELC> ruby's design draws from lisp and other sophisticated languages.

A lot of Ruby say that a proficient Perl programmer (and I guess
Hans and Taco fall in this category) can grasp the core of Rupy in
one day, and 95% of it in a couple of days. So it probably
wouldn't be too hard to switch.

ELC> It would be interesting to design a new typesetting language.  :) It
ELC> should have namespaces, lexical scoping, functions/procedures,
ELC> objects, and labeled loop constructs like perl (and Java, IIRC).

ELC> These language features would eliminate a lot of the hairier
ELC> shenanighans that the ConTeXt developers have to go through in order
ELC> to do interesting things.

Well, I was thinking of Ruby as a scripting language (to obtain
texexec.rb, texutil.rb & co), but now that you make me think of it
...

TeX in Ruby? Wow, sounds interesting!

-- 
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta