Perl or Python?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jul 02, 2009 at 12:21:35PM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> 2009/7/1 Rajinder Yadav <devguy-DaQTI0RpDDMAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>:
> >
> > My quest as lead me down the path to also consider Ruby =)
> >
> > The website states:
> >
> > "The beauty of Ruby is found in its balance between simplicity and power." - Marc, yes it's a vague statement ;)
> >
> > More to the point the creator says this:
> >
> > Initially, Matz looked at other languages to find an ideal syntax. Recalling his search, he said, “I wanted a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python3.”
> >
> > Are there any Ruby fans?
> 
> This is somewhat OT, but the mention of Ruby reminded me of an article
> I saw recently:
> 
> http://gmarceau.qc.ca/blog/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependability-of.html
> 
> It's an attempt to chart code size vs. speed of execution for various
> languages.  Ironically a language most of us have barely heard of
> (OCAML) produces the best-looking graph.  Ruby, Python, and Perl are
> all off-the-charts slow (they're being compared to compiled languages)
> but have very small code size.  Of course it's also dependent on
> things like how well the author wrote the code ...

OCAML (and ML in general) is a lovely language.  If I had any big project
to start, I would use that.  Too bad I haven't used it that much yet,
so I am not that used to the syntax yet.

Strong type checking, polymorphic functions, partial evaluation, lists
as a native type, etc.  Just lovely.  They might even have a decent OO
implementation, unlike C++ and java.  Haven't checked yet.

OCAML is often the language of choice (I think haskall is another
often seen) for programming competitions where execution speed and fast
development time for a team of developers matters.  java, c and c++ pretty
much never have a chance, being either way too slow, or way to difficult
to write bug free functional and maintainable code in under serious
time preasure.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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