I followed a pointer from
Bill de hÓra this morning and it
cost me an unplanned hour while the rest of the family slept, on
the subject of programming languages. If you care about such things, stop
reading here or you’re about to get stuck too; but that’s because it’s good
stuff. Bill pointed me at
Steve Yegge, somehow I hadn’t
run across him previously.
Item: Bruce Eckel on
The
Departure of the Hyper-Enthusiasts, which is too rich to summarize but if
you had to, it would be: Ruby is good, but not really good enough to beat
Python.
I
wrote about this before,
but the conversation it started really has legs.
Item: Steve Yegge pushes back with
A
little anti-anti-hype, which argues that friendlier languages sometimes
beat better languages, e.g. Perl vs. Python. The piece is, he admits,
inflammatory.
Item: Speaking of friendly languages, if Steve is right, Ruby has won,
check out
why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby
which isn’t just friendly, it’s a cute little puppy bouncing in your lap,
licking your nose.
Item: Back to Steve Yegge, who irritated enough people with that
previous piece that he wrote a follow-up,
Bambi
Meets Godzilla, making the same points, but well enough
that you don’t mind.
Item: Steve’s
Tour
de Babel is a really funny and entertaining romp through a bunch of
languages.
Item: Steve’s also interested in other-languages-on-the-JVM, just like
me. Unlike me, he positively despises the Java language. Memorable quote: “Java
has lots of wonderful features, but Java isn’t one of them. Java’s
appeal as a platform for doing real work rests precisely on its strengths as a
platform, not as a language.” This is in
JVM
Languages: Java 5, from the series entitled
Stevey’s JVM Language
Soko-Shootout, a really interesting run at a sample programming problem in
a bunch of different languages running on the JVM.
Item: Speaking of those languages, it turns out that
Charles Nutter who
(with Thomas Enebo) leads the JRuby project, has a blog, in
which he’s recently written about
Getting IRB
Going which he kind of has (although it turns out to be hard), enough to
type in Swing
(!) code; and a piece which starts talking about
JRuby
on Rails, but veers into a very interesting discussion of JRuby performance.
