On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 12:40:00PM +0200, Tels wrote:
On Friday 28 July 2006 08:44, Chad Perrin wrote: [snipauiteabit]
Perl really strikes me as the clear winner, overall, with Ruby a close second about a hair's-breadth behind it.
<offtopic>
I don't know much about Ruby, except that I heard Unicode support is really lacking. Which pretty much rules it out for anything serious text processing in this age :-D
"Really lacking" seems to be a bit too vehement for the current state of affairs. As far as I'm aware, regex support is excellent. Some kernel methods don't handle Unicode transformations as well as they could, though the problem isn't in Unicode support so much as in localization (handling capitalization in German and Turkish, for instance, which are a touch quirky by English language standards). I'm pretty sure Ruby isn't the only language to run into localization issues from time to time, and it may be that Ruby runs into them more often because of its wealth of convenient string operation methods that are often lacking in other languages.
However, the entire Ruby project always stuck me as a me-too-lets-reinvent-the-wheel-and-this-time-make-it-rounder project, like so many others (*cough*Perl6*cough).
1. That could be said of EVERY language. I suppose we could just rewrite MediaWiki in Assembly language, after all.
2. Ruby is quite NOT a "metoo" language. It's older than most realize (spending most of its formative years in Japan that largely gained Western recognition due to the advent of Rails does not equate to a lifespan measurable entirely in this century). It also offers a lot of capabilities and conveniences not found in many other languages. It may be the closest thing we've got to a Lisp with an imperative/OO syntax, for instance.
3. Perl 6 is an attempt to address some very real problems, not just a "reinvent and make it rounder" effort as you so easily dismiss it. The fact it's vaporware doesn't change the fact that, if it ever completes, it's likely to be an excellent and needed language. On the other hand, I suppose all we really need is a hex editor so we're not reinventing wheels.
Yes, Perl5 has some problems, like carrying baggage from a decade or two that nobody really needs anymore, but I am not sure that yet-another-interpreted-language (that is only 60..90% complete, undertested etc) is the real answer. It just fragments the coder base even more.
Did you perhaps mean "99.60..99.90%" there?
We have way too many programming languages already.
Yeah, progress sucks. Ahem.