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On 8/26/07, Terry Poulin <bigboss64 / ippimail.com> wrote:
>
> ...
> My experience with Java is roughly a decade out of date.... But in my
> opinion
> Java has a good *design* on a number of things but is to verbose and
> annoying
> to be *great* language. I've always found the common 'Hello world!'
> programs
> most language introductions start with as a good way to see just how much
> typing is expected for small tasks. I remember when I first started Java,
> I
> thought system.out.println() was nicely arranged but so much more typing
> then
> printf(). I learned a lot through studying Java but did my darn'st to
> _not_
> write any Java programs.
>
>
> I've found Ruby to be a very good balance for many things. While it might
> not
> be the fastest on execution time but it makes a tremendous improvement in
> the
> amount of time spent testing and debugging code. Even if you just chalk it
> off
> to less lines of code needed for more complex tasks, Ruby is more
> efficient
> for a lot of things. Things that are hard to do in Ruby or proof to much
> of a
> bottleneck. Can be moved into a C Extension; if neccessary & you know how,
> optimised at a lower level then Ruby as well. C is beautiful, Ruby is
> Effective, together they are probably awesome in some ways xD
> ...
>

I remember when Tcl became popular in the early 90's. On the performance
issue, John Ousterhout, Tcl's creator, argued that its performance was
actually very good, because you would write very few lines of Tcl and most
of the work would be done by the underlying compiled-code implementation.
Indeed, Tcl scripts are very succinct.

I suspect the same could be true in Ruby. Because Ruby code tends to be more
succinct than Java code, there is potentially greater room for optimization
(ignoring other issues due to language differences...), as less time needs
to be spent in the "interpretation of characters". Just a thought...

dean
-- 
Dean Wampler
http://www.objectmentor.com
http://www.aspectprogramming.com
http://aquarium.rubyforge.org
http://www.contract4j.org

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