Matthew Huntbach takes a long hard look at the coolest language on the planet and is distinctly under impressed by what he sees…
Friday 16 March 2007
by Matthew Huntbach
Tim Sweeney’s talk The Next Mainstream Programming Language (PowerPoint PPT) is in many ways an antidote to the recent Ruby hype. Tim calls for the use of stronger types to ensure program reliability. He praises the academically-developed Haskell functional programming language. He raises concurrency as a feature which must be tackled in the next big programming language, using a better model than the shared state with threads and mutual exclusion devices used by Java - and by Ruby - (...)
Contrary to a lot of the earlier comments, I found this article fair and that it raised some very good points. Ruby really is over-hyped. I don’t know why people don’t recognise the primitiveness of the "everything about this good," "you bad" fanboy attitude. Human nature I guess.
That being said, Ruby is fast becoming my personal favourite language and the addition of Rails gives a huge productivity boost to website development. As clichéd as it is, time really is money. As importantly, a programmer who isn’t mired in writing repetitious and unrewarding support code is a happier, better motivated person who can react much faster and with less stalling of the creative process. That has real, if intangible value as well.
There’s nothing wrong with calling for something new or something better. In the mean time, I’ll have fun with Ruby.
