Drinkable Chicken

In other news, _why has disappeared from the net. Most of his sites have apparently been deleted.

Not sure what happened there… It’s not unheard of for people to take a break from the internet, sometimes radically so, but to delete popular sites (like the Poignant Guide to Ruby) and code (Shoes, Hpricot, Hackety Hack, etc) seems odd. So maybe some foul play is the cause; if someone managed to hack his sites, they could have used the same password for his github and twitter account. (On the other hand, you’d think _why would have noticed by now, and appeared somewhere or another to let people know what’s going on.)

I guess time will tell… Right now it’s a mystery (which doesn’t stop some people from jumping to conclusions, by the way… or being a prick about it. :-).

Yesterday I stumbled upon this: Heist, a Scheme interpreter in Ruby.

It looks pretty good; it’s certainly more advanced than my attempt at a Scheme interpreter in Python (which is, in turn, more advanced than Psyche, and will be released eventually, once I backport some of the dollop code to it). Apparently it supports (among other things) hygienic macros and continuations, features that haven’t yet made it into my interpreter.

On a side note, it’s interesting to see how different the Ruby code looks compared to Python code. Five years ago I would have said (and did say :-) that Python and Ruby are much more alike than unalike. They still are, but they surely encourage (and discourage) different programming practices and idioms.

Stuff like this just ticks me off: Ruby – best introductory programming language. Not because Ruby wouldn’t make a good starter language, but rather because all the arguments that the article makes in favor of Ruby, apply equally well to Python, which has been around longer. So my first reaction to seeing articles like this is, “why not Python?”

(Just to make things clear: This is not an attempt to slam the author of the article; actually, I find the blog interesting and thought-inspiring, and just added it to my Bloglines today.)

I must admit that I do hold a bit of a grudge against those who ignored Python for years and now tout the benefits of Ruby, pointing to Ruby features that Python has had for ages. (You know. Everything is an object. Interactive interpreter. Changing objects on the fly. Etc.)

Of course, there might be good reasons for that, but I suspect that in many cases, the reasons for not choosing Python were superficial. It’s that weird whitespace language. Or maybe its object model doesn’t look like Java’s.

There was a time that there was much talk about how Python would make a great introductory language, how it could be taught to kids, and how it made programming fun again. These days, we’re hearing that again, but now it’s Ruby instead of Python. (Although there are exceptions. :-) What bothers me here is not that Ruby wouldn’t be a good choice, but that everybody suddenly has forgotten about Python, like it’s not a contender at all anymore.

Maybe we’re now getting a taste of how Lispers have felt for years, or maybe decades. (Then again, Lisp syntax isn’t exactly friendly to newbies or kids, is it?)