Well, no. Ruby is pretty clean, but still has its share of quirks and expections.

Lisp is probably simpler than Ruby, but that may be why it has yet to achieve the same mass appeal as Ruby.

It’s not that a language should be as simple as possible, but that it should find that difficult mix of conceptual purity and practical consideration.

There are things added or omited from Ruby because they made certain common tasks easier in the long run, at the expense of a trickier upfront learning curve.

(The problem is worse in Rails, as the number of forthcoming Rails books attest.)

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/articles/2005/10/28/comparing-technology-stacks-of-books

http://jutopia.tirsen.com/articles/2005/10/28/why-ruby-on-rails

It’s not that a language should be as simple as possible, but that it should find that difficult mix of conceptual purity and practical consideration.

There are things added or omited from Ruby because they made certain common tasks easier in the long run, at the expense of a trickier upfront learning curve.

Hi James,
thanks for your comment. When I indicated that Ruby’s strength is simplicity I did so considering what other alternatives are available in the real world. Ruby is definitely simpler than Java or C#, and in general Ruby is quite a simple and clean language.

This doesn’t mean that you won’t require time to learn Ruby or that it doesn’t have complicated features, but what Ruby does excellently is enable you to be up and operating in a very reasonable amount of time.

When I say “as simple as possible but not simpler”, the word “possible” does imply a compromise and I agree with your consideration about how programming languages should omit or exclude characteristics also based on real life requirements. I included “not simpler”, because otherwise the language is oversimplified (simpler than practically possible) at the expense of needed features. In the end Einstein said that famous quote speaking about the universe, which isn’t the easiest thing to understand. 🙂

Lisp is probably simpler than Ruby, but that may be why it has yet to achieve the same mass appeal as Ruby.

Lisp is a great language, I equate the lack of Lisp popularity to the fact that it is missing its own “Rails” killer web framework to bring hype to an otherwise 40 year old programming language. It’s sad but the popularity of programming languages often seems to have very little to do with the merit of the language itself. In Ruby’s case most people are studying it because they want to be productive with Rails. Au contraire, I’d say that it is smart to study Ruby just because Rails is an excellent example of how well you can design DSL in Ruby.

(The problem is worse in Rails, as the number of forthcoming Rails books attest.)

In my opinion, the number of books has much more to do with the hype and the wide adoption that Rails is gaining rather than the necessity of many books to simply understand Rails. Agile Web Development with Rails gives you all you need to let you work comfortably for a while, I think.

PS: Thanks for the links, “blank”. 😉

_Agile Web Development with Rails gives you all you need to let you work comfortably for a while, I think._

Yeah, if you’re developing for Rails 0.12…. =D

Cheers,
Antonio

In the end, after examining all of these languages, it turned out that each language is equally valid; most usually where it fails in one respect is succeeds in another. But despite this people continue to attack other languages. (There are some exceptions. I’ve never really heard anyone say that C is a dumb language, but I have heard that it is not recommended for all projects, which is probably true – just like in any language.)

Mostly, my internal struggle against programming languages is the actual language versus the end result. I find Ruby fun to use, but am I going to easily code a first person shooter with it? I like Java’s platform-independence, but it’s resource usage is high. The actual programming process is important for my sanity but at the end of it all it has to work for the users.