Apologies for resurrecting possibly dead threads, I'm catching up on ruby-talk mail. At 7:19 AM +0900 7/26/01, Peter Hickman wrote: [snip] >It is not unusual that there are more Smalltalk people here than anywhere >outside of a Smalltalk NG. Ruby does OO well and Smalltalk programmers are >rather fussy about their OO, to me it is a sign that it has been done right. >Now if we could design something to get the Lisp people on board... Well, inasmuch as I count, I'm on board with both Ruby and especially the Ruby community, and I like to fancy myself both a Lisp zealot and Smalltalk affcionado (but then again, I'm a certified language junkie). From the Lisp side of things, Ruby does some things "right", but many true Lisp zealots will always equate that anything less than Lisp is still wrong. For me, I love Lisp (both Common Lisp and Scheme, which puts me apart from the Lisp community in some ways, since most people choose one or the other and stick with is as The One True Lisp), but I also appreciate diversity. Peter Norvig has a a great comparison of Python and Lisp at <http://www.norvig.com/python-lisp.html>. A Ruby and Lisp comparison may be useful, but I think the comparison to Smalltalk is more apropos. Since the OO model of Ruby is more fundamentally complete and intrinsic than Python's, I think it shares more direct features with Smalltalk. Python shares more with Lisp because it's easy to do things in Python that are very Lispy, and both languages focus less on a particularly coherent OO model (Python's approach to objects has been talked about before in this thread, and I agree with the viewpoint that in Lisp and other functional languages like it, objects are not necessarily The Way [although Common Lisp does have CLOS, so they're there if you want them, but generic functions are more fundamental]). -- Dan Moniz <dnm / pobox.com> [http://www.pobox.com/~dnm/]