Ruby, Lisp, Python

20 Mar 2012

Up late tonight reading about Emacs Lisp, I came across Tour de Babel by Steve Yegge comparing different languages (C, C++, Java, etc), and why he likes Lisp and Ruby so much.

I’m stuck in stodgy Python land at the moment, this is balm for the soul:

Anyway, Ruby stole everything good from Perl; … 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.