Name: Anonymous 2009-05-29 0:22
Every 15 years or so, languages are replaced with better ones. C was replaced by C++, at least for large-scale application development by people who needed performance but desperately wanted data types too. C++ is being replaced by Java, and Java will doubtless be replaced with something better in seven years — well, seven years after it finishes replacing C++, which evidently hasn't fully happened yet, mostly because Microsoft was able to stall it before it became ubiquitous on the desktop. But for server-side applications, C++ is basically on its way out.
Perl will be gone soon, too. That's because a new language called Ruby has finally been translated into English. Yep, it was invented in Japan, of all places — everyone else was as surprised as you are, since Japan's known for its hardware and manufacturing, but not for its software development. Why, is anyone's guess, but I'm thinking it's the whole typing thing; I just can't imagine they were able to type fast enough before, what with having an alphabet with ten thousand characters in it. But Emacs got multibyte support a few years ago, so I can imagine they're pretty dang fast with it now. (And yes, they use Emacs — in fact Japanese folks did the majority of the Mule [multibyte] support for Emacs, and it's rock-solid.)
Anyway, Ruby stole everything good from Perl; in fact, Matz, Ruby's author (Yukihiro Matsumoto, if I recall correctly, but he goes by "Matz"), feels he may have stolen a little too much from Perl, and got some whale guts on his shoes. But only a little.
For the most part, Ruby took Perl's string processing and Unix integration as-is, meaning the syntax is identical, and so right there, before anything else happens, you already have the Best of Perl. And that's a great start, especially if you don't take the Rest of Perl.
But then Matz took the best of list processing from Lisp, and the best of OO from Smalltalk and other languages, and the best of iterators from CLU, and pretty much the best of everything from everyone.
And he somehow made it all work together so well that you don't even notice that it has all that stuff. I learned Ruby faster than any other language, out of maybe 30 or 40 total; it took me about 3 days before I was more comfortable using Ruby than I was in Perl, after eight years of Perl hacking. It's so consistent that you start being able to guess how things will work, and you're right most of the time. It's beautiful. And fun. And practical.
If languages are bicycles, then Awk is a pink kiddie bike with a white basket and streamers coming off the handlebars, Perl is a beach cruiser (remember how cool they were? Gosh.) and Ruby is a $7,500 titanium mountain bike. The leap from Perl to Ruby is as significant as the leap from C++ to Java, but without any of the downsides, because Ruby's essentially a proper superset of Perl's functionality, whereas Java took some things away that people missed, and didn't offer real replacements for them.
Perl will be gone soon, too. That's because a new language called Ruby has finally been translated into English. Yep, it was invented in Japan, of all places — everyone else was as surprised as you are, since Japan's known for its hardware and manufacturing, but not for its software development. Why, is anyone's guess, but I'm thinking it's the whole typing thing; I just can't imagine they were able to type fast enough before, what with having an alphabet with ten thousand characters in it. But Emacs got multibyte support a few years ago, so I can imagine they're pretty dang fast with it now. (And yes, they use Emacs — in fact Japanese folks did the majority of the Mule [multibyte] support for Emacs, and it's rock-solid.)
Anyway, Ruby stole everything good from Perl; in fact, Matz, Ruby's author (Yukihiro Matsumoto, if I recall correctly, but he goes by "Matz"), feels he may have stolen a little too much from Perl, and got some whale guts on his shoes. But only a little.
For the most part, Ruby took Perl's string processing and Unix integration as-is, meaning the syntax is identical, and so right there, before anything else happens, you already have the Best of Perl. And that's a great start, especially if you don't take the Rest of Perl.
But then Matz took the best of list processing from Lisp, and the best of OO from Smalltalk and other languages, and the best of iterators from CLU, and pretty much the best of everything from everyone.
And he somehow made it all work together so well that you don't even notice that it has all that stuff. I learned Ruby faster than any other language, out of maybe 30 or 40 total; it took me about 3 days before I was more comfortable using Ruby than I was in Perl, after eight years of Perl hacking. It's so consistent that you start being able to guess how things will work, and you're right most of the time. It's beautiful. And fun. And practical.
If languages are bicycles, then Awk is a pink kiddie bike with a white basket and streamers coming off the handlebars, Perl is a beach cruiser (remember how cool they were? Gosh.) and Ruby is a $7,500 titanium mountain bike. The leap from Perl to Ruby is as significant as the leap from C++ to Java, but without any of the downsides, because Ruby's essentially a proper superset of Perl's functionality, whereas Java took some things away that people missed, and didn't offer real replacements for them.