Comments on: What Arc should learn from Ruby

By: Gabe

Gabe — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:16:59 +0000

@Greg – Very good point. I know Graham wants to do the Right Thing with Arc. I hope he can succeed as it would be really exciting, but I don’t hold out high hopes. The history of the software world is strewn about with failed projects with lofty goals. The loftier the goal the more likely a project is to fail and have its lunch eaten by some half-baked project someone threw together to solve some half-baked problem.

By: Greg Koenig

Greg Koenig — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 03:10:44 +0000

Hi Antonio. Your blog posting has been linked from reddit.com. Someone on reddit briefly said what I’m going to say here, but I wanted to hopefully pass along some food for thought directly to your blog.

I believe that the concept you are discussing is the “Worse is Better” idea, described by Lisp hacker Richard Gabriel ca. 1991. (If you never have, I recommend reading his article “Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big”.) In essence, Ruby gains followers who bring time, energy, and money with them because Ruby is “good enough” to get things done now, even if it has some flaws that it may have to live with due to setting things in stone early on. Arc, on the other hand, gains none of this because it is being developed to be the Right Thing. According to Gabriel’s argument, Ruby will likely win out (at least in the short term).

Although I don’t always agree with everything Paul Graham says, he is a smart guy and certainly knows very well what Gabriel learned at lucid.com. I suspect, based on reading things that Graham has written such as his essay “The Hundred-Year Language”, that he is trying to do the Right Thing with Arc because he is trying to lay down a foundation that will long outlast languages like Ruby. Consider, for instance, the challenges faced by the Perl community with the transition to Perl 6 or faced by the Python community with the transition to Python 3. Both of these break some amount of backwards compatibility in order to allow the languages to grow. Is it a sure thing that their respective communities will accept these changes and that the languages will continue to thrive? I guess I’m not yet convinced of that.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to write such a thorough blog posting!

By: Ali

Ali — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:06:34 +0000

@Arthur
I’d totally agree, but you shouldn’t design the semantics of a language around readability. Yes, I find Ruby more readable. Which do I find more beautiful? Scheme. Every. Single. Time.

By: Arthur Klepchukov

Arthur Klepchukov — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 21:42:56 +0000

@Antonio

Thanks for the interesting read!

@Ted

There is something to be said for the difference in readability between Ruby and Scheme. A set of RSpec test cases read like English and can be easily understood by someone trying to get up to speed with the existing functionality and requirements of an app. Can Scheme offer that? Self-documentation shouldn’t be the only form of documentation but it’s a pretty nice side effect of a very readable language.

By: Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 16:38:24 +0000

Ted, De gustibus non est disputandum. ;-)

By: Ted Henry

Ted Henry — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 16:21:52 +0000

> Ruby was a very good programming language

> [Ruby] was a beautiful general purpose language

I think the novelty of Ruby has worn off for most programmers and it’s time to let both of these go. Ruby is merely an ok language with major implementation bugs. As far as beautiful languages go, Ruby looks like ASCII vomit in comparison to Scheme. Compare making a lambda in both languages, for example. Then, of course, there are macros, which Ruby doesn’t have.

By: mark

mark — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 15:54:46 +0000

Great read. I would like to differ one one point – while Rails injected a lot of interest, I and several others never cared much about rails.

In my case the usage scenario was that I needed a better language than perl and php. Despite the reassurance of developers of those two languages I quickly came to realize that both ruby and python are better languages (for my needs). An interview done by matz influenced me on picking ruby, and while I did learn python too I felt that Ruby is simply more beautiful. But python source code is acceptable too, unlike perl or php.

Rails injected a lot of ecosystems into the system, which is a good thing. But it sometimes is tied too closely to rails. I would like to remain as independent as possible.

This is why I still have avoided rails.

I just want to state that the development of ruby as a general purpose language is not dictated by rails – just influenced a lot. But we should not over-emphasize this.

By: Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 14:36:14 +0000

Joe, I see your point, but I still think that having no useful libraries and no “real problem to solve” hurt the language more. There are plenty of toy languages which are used by very few because of this.

By: Joe Strickler

Joe Strickler — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 10:57:45 +0000

You’re missing the point. Having more developers right now would certainly mean the language would be more usable right now.

But this is harmful if you are still working on the language. As you know, once a library becomes even a defacto standard, it’s done; you can’t change the language characteristics employed in that library without pissing everyone off.

And I think that’s why Paul feels it is not only unnecessary, but could be harmful; bad “features” could get locked into the language if it’s more heavily adopted right now.

By: Brandon

Brandon — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 05:53:23 +0000

This was a good read. Thanks.