[erlang-questions] I would never use python (was: separators before end)

[Minsloc Tarren]

On 9/21/07, Jay Parlar <parlar@REDACTED> wrote:
> On 9/21/07, Minsloc Tarren <minsloc@REDACTED> wrote:

> You don't normally indent your code?

yes, i do (in case you mean manually, i did). i let my ide to do it.

>
> How you can say oop is glued? Everything is an object. Even functions

self as required implicit parameter and a few other things. no, i dont
know python much.

are you saying python started as oo language ? i thought oo was added
later, like in case of perl. which is another lang i played with a bit
and abandoned. no bad feelings although it can be pretty cryptical. no
drive to use it, though. but it made a nice glue between urlsnarf and
mysql some six years back ;-).

> are objects. Do you think this just because of the explicit self? I've
> seen this "claim" before, and it's just plain wrong. Look at the
> source code for the Python interpreter, EVERYTHING IS AN OBJECT. And
> the great part is, that if you hate OOP, you can just pretend it

i have nothing against oop (erlang is kinda oop without oop ;-)))

> doesn't exist.
>
>
> > it's also said that every language opens your mind in another way.
> > mentioning only the main langs in their respective categories, will python
> > teach me something new after c, ruby, smalltalk, lisp and erlang (which i'm
> > still learning) ?
>
> If you already know Ruby *really* well, then Python won't teach you
> too much. I'm a Python guy, I use it for everything that I can (though
> I'm trying to learn Erlang), and for the most part, Ruby and Python
> are interchangeable. Strongly typed dynamic languages with great
> interpreters. Really comes down to which syntax you prefer, and a few

if you knew ruby and python, you would have known that python is
compiled (don't know if it even has an interpreter, but can be even
compiled to native code), and ruby's interpreter is dog slow and can
be crashed using floating point math extensively. ruby 2.0/rite is
announced like being worked on some 3 or more years, but wait for
Smalltalk's original vm specs, (or just check the progress, which is
pretty fast), ruby bytecode compiler/vm based on the blue book,
Smalltalk's original vm specs.

Not so surprising, ruby is basically smalltalk with c-like syntax. And
without image, but with rubinius, that might become possible. Of
course, using mixins is a completely different strategy than smalltalk
uses, so it won't be entirely like smalltalk, but at least it should
be possible to save a state of running calculation and resume it
later.

> other minors things (ie. blocks, iterators). It's actually funny, how
> similar Python and Ruby really are, considering their development has
> not been linked at all.
>
> Although for certain tasks, Python is much better, thanks to the large
> number of third party libraries. Of course, the Ruby on Rails buzz has
> helped Ruby gain more libraries, but some things just take a long time
> to do (numpy and scipy, for example).
>
>
> > learning something new and important would be probably the only thing that
> > would force me to start with python ...
>
> Again, if you already know Ruby really well, then there's not a
> *whole* lot of reasons to learn Python. However, I'll tell you this:
> It won't be hard to learn Python, if you know Ruby, and since it's

i'm not saying it would be hard. i'm saying that python looks so ugly
to me that trying to do so was (very) unpleasant. and as i code
because i enjoy to do so, it was a no-go.

> such a popular language, it's a good thing to know.

java's popular, and i'm not going to learn it (i know the basics, and
never had used it extensively, ugly as python, from different
reasons). php is popular, but since i left it behind, i'm refusing
real money because i don't like to code in it.

> Jay P.
>