scripting languages

[Eric Wald]

Von Fugal wrote:
> <quote name="Levi Pearson" date="Mon,  8 Nov 2010 at 10:59 -0700">
>> Ruby is sort of Perl-like in cleverness, but with object-orientedness
>> baked into everything as with Python.  It also borrows liberally from
>> Scheme and Smalltalk, which are a couple of my favorite programming
>> languages.  Unfortunately, someone went and wrote Rails with it, and
>> the community was apparently taken over by pretentious idiot Rails
>> fanbois.  I'd recommend staying away until you are sufficiently
>> inoculated against that sort of idiocy, or at least have someone you
>> trust to keep you grounded in reality.
>
> This is one big reason I love ruby. It borrows so much great stuff from
> so many great places. Scheme, perl, smalltalk. My heart glows. It has
> object-orientedness baked into _everything_, NOT as with python. Python
> has plenty that is not objecty, and it bums me out.

At that, at least Python is objecty enough to avoid the pitfalls of
Java.  There's a trade-off of safety and power; I happen to feel
comfortable with Python's placement on the spectrum.  Granted, it hasn't
always been as objectified as it now is; I for one am glad to be able to
subclass int and dict.

> As for the rails dilemma, I fully agree. Rails is awesome, don't get me
> wrong, but the fanboi hordes that have loitered the community are
> much like those pertaining to the Tea Party. Both are extremely
> unfortunate and are to be avoided.

Interesting.  You imply that there is a fundamentally good idea hidden
somewhere deep inside the Tea Party that could be usefully ported to a
more productive platform.  I would love to know what it is; my fanboi
cousin has led me to believe the whole thing was full of lunatics.

- Eric