An Ode To My Two Loves

[Jamey Cribbs]

At the risk of calling my manhood into question, I humbly submit the
following little diddy (which is a blatant rip-off of a heart wrenching
melody of the '70s by that international superstar, Mary Macgregor):

To the tune of "Torn Between Two Lovers":

Torn between two languages, both of which are awesome tools
Lovin' both of you is breakin' all the rules
Torn between two incredibly awesome scripting languages, I'm
startin' to drool
Using you both is breakin' all the rules


Is freedom of choice wonderful or a curse? I do a lot of scripting at
my day job. Through the years, I've gone through what will probably
seem a somewhat familiar progression of scripting languages. Started
out with Tcl, moved to Perl when I began to do some serious text
munging, moved back to Tcl/Tk when I needed to do some gui stuff, jumped
to Python as I began to learn object oriented programming, told Python I
needed more space and moved in with Ruby when I needed to do more gui
stuff and wanted to use FXRuby.

And that's where I stand now, Torn Between Two Scripting Languages.
Python and Ruby are both so damn attractive that I can't commit to one
of them. I don't want to settle down into a monogamous programming
relationship. I mean, if you have Grace Kelly on one arm and Maureen
O'Hara on the other (I'm old school), should you really have to give one
of them up?

Why can't my boss understand this? But no, he has to lecture me about
the dangers of "foolin' around" with too many languages. "Oh sure", he
says, "you're having fun now juggling two beautiful languages in the
air. But how long can you keep living two lives? Sooner or later you
are going to slip up and make a mistake. My god, man, what if you start
leaving off the 'end' in your if statements? What if you forget that
indentation DOES matter?! For the love of all that is sacred and holy,
think of the programs!"

My boss was always a little melodramatic.

Anyway, I don't know why I'm typing this up. I just finished a major
update to KirbyBase and I think I'm a little punch drunk. I have been
spending a lot of time with Ruby lately and working on KirbyBase caused
me to dive back into Python. Why do these two languages have to be so
freakin' good! I know a lot of people see big differences in the
languages, but I'm not one of them. I don't think I am a smart enough
programmer to understand or ever be bothered by some of the more subtle
or deeper differences that some people have pointed out. Ah, ignorance
is bliss.

Well, as long as I can keep my boss from finding out that I am in this
programming love triangle, I think I will probably stay happily enmeshed
in my little soap opera.

Well, I think I will go now and listen to my Captain & Tenille
records...why are you looking at me like that. I'm a happily married
man with four kids. I like football and guns...really, I do!

Under the influence of some kind of strange force and will probably be
embarrassed when he snaps out of it,

Jamey Cribbs

 

[Luis M. Gonzalez]

Jamey,

Really, you should try to steer clear from your computer from time to
time...
Your mental health is more important than python or ruby, don't lose
it!

 

[Jorgen Grahn]

At the risk of calling my manhood into question, ....
Under the influence of some kind of strange force and will probably be
embarrassed when he snaps out of it,

You shouldn't be -- I don't think I've seen anyone talk much about this
before, at least not from this angle.

It's something that worries me frequently -- I feel guilty when I introduce
Python into ("force Python upon") an organization. Because I hate having
/other/ people's favorite toy languages forced down /my/ throat ...

I also notice I forget one language after doing another for a few weeks. And
it's not just brackets and semicolons -- I also try to use one language's
idioms in the other. People who /claim/ they have no trouble switching
languages seem to have the same problem.

I refuse to think that Using One Language For Everything is the
solution. But I cannot explain it rationally.

/Jorgen

 

[Peter Maas]

It's something that worries me frequently -- I feel guilty when I introduce
Python into ("force Python upon") an organization. Because I hate having
/other/ people's favorite toy languages forced down /my/ throat ...

The solution is a multi language glue layer. Software interfaces are
defined in a language independent way so that they can be used by
many languages.I wonder why COM is so dominant on Windows and most
Unixish systems don't use CORBA (with GNOME as an exception).
Microsoft's .net takes this one step further by defining a multi
language implementation layer.

I hope these ideas will become more influential in Unix like systems
as well just to stop this resource wasting source code issue.

 

[Alex Martelli]

I also notice I forget one language after doing another for a few weeks. And
it's not just brackets and semicolons -- I also try to use one language's
idioms in the other. People who /claim/ they have no trouble switching
languages seem to have the same problem.

I don't find it a problem as long as the languages are simple and
well-separated. Python and C are a good example: each is simple, and
each is pretty well-focused -- high-level vs low-level.

It's not necessarily easy if you're continuously going back and forth
between C++ and Java, for example -- in such a case, it seems to me that
transitioning into the proper mindset for each language may well be a
nonzero effort, since the languages aren't really all that simple, and
they have quite some overlap despite all the differences.

I have no experience with such switching between (say) Ruby and Python
-- both simple but vastly overlapping in scope.


Alex

 

[Mike Meyer]

The solution is a multi language glue layer. Software interfaces are
defined in a language independent way so that they can be used by
many languages.I wonder why COM is so dominant on Windows and most
Unixish systems don't use CORBA (with GNOME as an exception).
Microsoft's .net takes this one step further by defining a multi
language implementation layer.

COM is dominant on Windows because MS pushes it. CORBA isn't dominant
on Unix because there are a slew of extensible/embeddable languages to
pick from instead - assuming the apps in question came up with a
solution better than rolling their own. See <URL:
http://www.mired.org:8080/home/mwm/scripting/ > for my thoughts on the
matter before I learned better.

I hope these ideas will become more influential in Unix like systems
as well just to stop this resource wasting source code issue.

XMLRPC seems to be displacing CORBA for interobject
communications. It's not clear it's becoming an intercommunications
tool for scripting applications.

In any case, Plan 9 has a much better solution than COM, CORBA or
XMLRPC. I can script plan 9 applications with the shell. I can't do
that with CORBA (well, my quick search failed to turn up CORBA
bindings for sh. It can probably be done with XMLRPC, but it would be
ugly. The problem is that this requires fundamental changes in the
underlying OS (by adding per-process mount points), but there's
mention of experiments with that for Linux.

<mike

 

[Aahz]

COM is dominant on Windows because MS pushes it. CORBA isn't dominant
on Unix because there are a slew of extensible/embeddable languages to
pick from instead - assuming the apps in question came up with a
solution better than rolling their own. See <URL:
http://www.mired.org:8080/home/mwm/scripting/ > for my thoughts on the
matter before I learned better.

"Unable to connect to host"
--
Aahz ([email protected]) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable
classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code --
not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to death." --GvR

 

[Mike Meyer]

"Unable to connect to host"

My bad. That should be http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/scripting/ .

<mike