Given that a Steve Yegge blog post started this discussion, you might be interested in another (earlier) post of his....
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html and something more for the Javascript fan-boys: http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html BTW having worked with a number of mainstream languages - FORTRAN, C, C++, Java, Javascript, XML, XSLT and lately Ruby....I'd have to say I'm having a "lot of fun" working with Ruby right now. However, I'm not building web sites and I haven't used Python (shame), so I'm missing the point on where Ruby "fails". Perhaps also I've been doing too much BPEL lately and every language looks good from there. One annoying thing I'm finding with loosely typed Ruby is that the compile/debug/compile cycle has been replaced by unit-test/debug/unit-test. The thing that saves me though is that Runit and Rake make unit testing very easy. This really irritated me with Javascript when I was using it heavily a few years ago because it lacked a good test environment. Perhaps that has changed. (and yes I mention XML and XSLT as programming languages because that is the way that so many "enterprise systems" treat them - look at BPEL for example....but then maybe you shouldn't). Regards, Saul
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