Good response Saifi. I would have to agree here that it is much like cricket. Shot selection is key.
To play the right shot - field positions, line, length and situation have to taken into account. Developers, Software Companies & Enterprises are craving simple constructs that deliver big value. It is this need that drove Spring/Hibernate to the fore in the Java world and it is the same driver that brought Ruby-on-Rails to prominence. Haskell is a very, very cool language and something worth learning if you are considering doing a project in C/C++ today. This is a cool link to an article that shows that in an increasingly multi-core world, the effort:reward ratio is changing. http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2007/11/29#smoking-4core At 3+ cores, a Haskell program is out-performing an unoptimized C program. All the Haskell developer had to do was add *"import Control.Parallel"* to the mix. The C developer would have to be wary of: synchronisation, communication, race conditions, dead locks, live locks. semaphores, mutexes but eventually will outperform Haskell. As we have seen historically, simplicity wins. Also, Erlang is fascinating but not applicable to a host of scenarios and still needs considerable enhancements to make it usable by mainstream developers on mainstream solutions. In fact, I am convinced that inter-process communication by message passing (Erlang's competitive advantage) will likely be implemented in one or more flagship languages by next year. Going by gut feel, Ruby might be the first. C# might as well. And then Erlang will become what it was again and turn into a pumpkin. ;) Happy New Year! Cheers, Zubin. On Dec 31, 2007 2:15 PM, Saifi Khan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 27 Dec 2007, Ragu wrote: > > > > > I never learned Perl, but it was one of the first languages I looked at > > when I realized I need to think beyond C/C++. I bumped into the sweet > > Ruby instead, and never looked at perl again. I stayed farther away from > > > perl when I came across perl code now and then (the perl code was > > presented as a comparison to ruby, so there may be pro-ruby bias in it). > > > > Here is my question, is it really worthwhile to look at Perl now? I > > understand that different languages would induce different kind of > > thinking about programming problem. But I would probably look at > > Haskell, and/or Erlang for that purpose than Perl. > > > > So I am wondering what are the voids in Ruby that could be ably filled > > by Perl. The answer to this could motivate me to learn Perl. > > > > Your opinions welcome. > > > > Cheers, > > Ragu > > > > Hi Ragu: > > Syntactic sugar is what most of the programmer's look at > when dating a language ! > > Most of programming is about modeling a scenario or abstraction. > > Usually the abstraction is supplied by an algorithm. > > Rest of the code is > - processing input > - error handling > - logging > - presenting the output > (on stdout or updating the view in user interface). > > Pragmatically speaking, the choice of the language to learn is > decided by *market opportunities*. > > If it pays more to be a Java programmer, then most of the people > will learn Java. This also means that more companies will write > software in Java, since that's a readily available skill set. > > Given, the above logic, it won't be surprising to see Artificial > intelligence software written in Java. > > On technical merit alone, one should use a language that supports > first order logic, lambda calculus and classifiers ! > > Every time, i see design of webapps, i feel like modeling them using > continuations. > > Please see Abhijit's article on IBM Developer works > http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-contin.html > > The only suggestion that i have for any programmer including > myself is this: > > "In your given domain, select/learn the language > whose throw-away-the-code affordability is highest". > > By this logic, > > for [system administration], scripts that can be cron'd, work across > large number of platforms, have mature library support and can be > copied and improved upon are valuable. > > There are admin folks, who have 300+ scripts that they wrote and > then improvised upon and later some more. Today those scripts are > indispensable. > > The pattern matching engine of PERL (NFA) is so sophisticated that > it beats a similar handwritten program in C. > > PERL's approach of using 'closures' for accomplishing object-orientedness > is a pragmatic one. > > The ROI provided by PERL beats Ruby any day, inspite of how the syntax > looks. > > for modeling [functional behaviour], haskell is very good, particularly > list comprehensions. Later in the same program when you need to do i/o > monad is an excellent design device for handling the introduced impurity. > within the monad you are free to introduce all optimizations you can > think off. > > Ruby as manifested in Rails does quite well when used with scaffolding, > convention and agile model (to handle requirements). > > The Rails framework helps create demonstrable value and yet one can > afford to throw away the prototype code. Hence the agility. > > Hence the great popularity of web framework and webservice platforms > built on Rails. > > Consider this. You are new game programmer and is looking out for a > job. You go for an interview. Chances are you will be interviewed on > Lua, in case 'game level design, UI layout' related discussions comes > up. Other languages don't make the cut here. > > Thanks for reading this far. > > thanks > Saifi. > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
