David Christensen wrote: > Joel Rees wrote: > > Did you say you'd looked at Ruby? > > I didn't say, but, yes, I have looked at Ruby. It seems to be > purpose-built for web stuff, which would help me with the web apps > I'm wanting, but I don't know how well it would work for everything > else.
I like Ruby quite a bit. It wasn't designed for the web but was designed to be able to create a domain specific languages. Just like lisp and others before it. People have used that ability to target web frameworks and of late it is web frameworks that have made it extremely popular in those circles. But also other topic areas are also targeted too. It isn't just about the web. I used Ruby for a number of years before the Ruby on Rails framework existed. But Ruby suffers from being popular on platforms that lack a good package manager. That hurts it terribly on Debian because so many Ruby authors have written so much packaging code making it difficult or perhaps impossible to create a well behaved system package of it. It is difficult to use Ruby without a network connection in order to be able to download scripts on the fly from the network and run them on the fly as part of an installation. I keep waiting for Ruby to mature and get past these packaging problems. I hope that one day it will be as well packaged as Perl. But years have rolled by and still the problems continue. > >And there's also Forth, but you say you want support for familiar > >paradigms, so that may not be such a good suggestion. > > Forth looks similar to LISP. Hmm... Maybe in an abstract concept way. They are both small core languages and in that way are similar. But I think they are also significantly different in practical use. For example Forth's interactive shell and associated syntax is fairly suitable as a command shell. It's low memory footprint makes it ideal for small embedded machines. I have seen it used in a lot of machine control applications. Lisp isn't a language I would want to try to type in on the command line. It is a language that I would rather interact with inside an editor. Lisp depends upon dynamic strings and garbage collection to the extent that it hasn't traditionally been a choice of embedded systems developers. Bob
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