Re: Re[2]: Perl is evil, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ruby, Python is the way to go!

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

At 10:06 AM 7/18/2002 -0400, Ed L Cashin wrote:
>(Let me preface this with the comment that I think perl is a great,
>but quirky, language, and that it's possible and not too hard to write
>efficient, readable, reliable, structured large programs in perl.)
>
>Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl> writes:
>
> > never mind; concerning languages: python is probably ok, but i dislike
> > the indentation idea; smalltalk is ok too, but i only played with it,
> > long ago (the original smalltalk books are great), i've read about
> > eiffel and like the language, will look into ruby when i come across,
> > like lisp because it's clean, like modula because i've done a lot in
> > it; i really like tex but occasionally dislike it due to some missing
> > features; i definitely like metapost; i dislike c because of the
> > syntax, but c++ looks better; i have no opinion yet about java but i
> > dislike the slowness of nts; if i remember well, i liked the machine
> > code of the 1802 processor, etc etc
>
>I shared your hesitations regarding Python.  When I heard about ruby
>it seemed too good to be true, and I kept thinking that I wouldn't
>ever prefer ruby to perl because it wouldn't have such-and-such
>feature, but the more I learned about it the more impressed I was.  I
>now do prefer ruby.
>
>While it's easy to use perl in a clean way, it's easier in ruby, and
>ruby's design draws from lisp and other sophisticated languages.
>
>It would be interesting to design a new typesetting language.  :) It
>should have namespaces, lexical scoping, functions/procedures,
>objects, and labeled loop constructs like perl (and Java, IIRC).
>
>These language features would eliminate a lot of the hairier
>shenanighans that the ConTeXt developers have to go through in order
>to do interesting things.

Last week i downloaded some ruby documentation and i was impressed too, 
looks pretty clean and ok. So, when i have time ...

With regards to typesetting, hairy indeed, but in many cases it's the 
problem itself that is also hairy; also recently i added a couple of things 
to context that i should have added before, since they would hav esaved me 
much time -)

Hans
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