3 OO Languages, 2 duelings Bruces, and DHH in a pear tree
So DHH has posted his thoughts into the mild back and forth going on between Bruce Tate and Bruce Eckel over Java and Ruby, with a little Perl/Python throw in the mix.
I won’t stand in their way, because I figure they know a lot more about what they’re talking about than I do. And healthy debate is a good thing.
But I will throw this in. Technical merits and whatnot and hoo-hah aside, I think there’s one aspect that’s being overlooked here - and that is how you feel after learning a bit of Ruby and writing your first program. It’s empowering. It’s like paying off a big loan early. It’s very satisfying.
Lots of people come to ruby-talk and say “wow, this is neat. I like this a lot. It makes me happy.”. I’ve never heard anyone say that of Java. Sure, after they’re done writing their program and get their paycheck and go to the bar for a drink they may think about being happy, but you sure don’t hear about the happiness during the process in Java like you do in Ruby.
And that’s at least 50% of what this is all about, right? Being happy at what you’re doing. It seems to me like the bickering over .getLast(size+1) vs .last is a bit trivial in its implementation form, and the whole “well if you had used a linkedlist instead of a non-linkedlist you would have found that the performance issue has been replaced from O(log(2n+theta)) to O(-2*pi*cos(phi)).
But I don’t care. It’s good that people out there in the world are debating naming schemes and design and what’s optimal. In the meantime, I’ll stick to writing programs that work, that look nice, and that make me happy while doing it.