"Jason Watkins" <jason_watkins / pobox.com> wrote in
news:bic62r$qp7$1 / nnrp.atgi.net: 

> OCaml is a fine language, but it certainly is not as fun as ruby...
> unless you're a functional languages geek :P.
> 
> I would suggest you just go out and try Ruby. Trying to reason about
> weither it's slow or not based on some tables in a webpage is really
> just stumbling in the dark. Unless you're doing high performance
> systems, I doubt you'll notice ruby's speed. If you're doing high
> performance systems, you likely would just be using c or c++ and it
> wouldn't even occur to you to use ruby 
>:).
> 
> Just give up and learn to love ruby, slow as it might be in
> benchmarks. In the times and tasks I've used it, it's speed has never
> been an issue. 
> 
>> Meanwhile the C++ template lovers praise snippets that can
>> calculate something trivial like factorials or logarithms
>> in base 2 ;).
> 
> Typically I just lurk here. However, I'd like to point out that
> typelists, traits, enforcements, and many other c++ template
> metaprogramming techniques are practical and likely will become widely
> used idioms. It is awkward, ugly, and broken in many compilers. But
> it's also useful. Many people criticise what Alexandrescu and others
> are doing because at first pass it seems like stupid programmer
> tricks. If instead you take the optimistic point of view and begin to
> see that if you use them appropriatly... I think you'll get excited at
> the implications it has. 

Have you looked at D - http://www.digitalmars.com/d/

It provides templates as well as many other things (C++ without all the 
baggage in some ways).

-- 
Robert Cowham