A bijou language-ette

Last night I wrote my first program in Ruby. So far I like it, a lot.

I’d been intending to learn something better than Perl for a long time. Perl is very useful, and with CPAN you can get a great deal done in very little time. (Thanks, Jarkko—how’s it going?) However, it’s a really crufty and syntaxy language, and the way it supports object-oriented programming is so butt-ugly and riddled with pitfalls that I had never bothered to get to grips with it enough to write my own classes. People complain about regular expression code in Perl being write-only, but to my mind it’s the OO code that’s the real problem. Not just that it’s ugly; as the tutorial says, “Yes, this is a lot of work”. Using OO shouldn’t be a lot of work, that’s the whole point of it!

I think that the Perl motto of “There’s more than one way to do it” has become something of a convenient excuse for not making difficult decisions. I don’t need two or three different syntaxes for method invocation, particularly not if they’re all ugly. I don’t need a variety of different types of scoping, and any language where the simplest and cleanest scoping options still require a lengthy tutorial needs to be taken out and shot.

I read the Apocalypses. I wanted to know if Perl 6 was going to become the language I wanted, in much the same way that Perl 5 had become a tolerable version of Perl 4. It’s clear that Larry Wall understands how awful Perl’s OO system is, in that he adds a whole bunch of fundamental problems to my rather superficial ones. Unfortunately, the proposed new clean OO for Perl 6 looks to have a lot of the ugly and arbitrary syntax that is a familiar feature of Perl—like $.x for a public variable and $:y for a private one, %_ for a variable list of arguments, all the way up to abominations like %::::($package)::method. And still “There are too many ways to do it”, for example in regular expressions you have a whole new syntax, plus you can use m:p5/ and use all the old Perl 5 syntax. Or hey, why not use both?

And Perl 6 isn’t even out yet. Who knows what kinds of compromises will be made before it becomes real? And it’s clearly going to have a major learning curve for Perl 5 users, so much so that some people are grumpily saying they’ll stick with Perl 5. Me, I’m always ready to learn a new language—but if I’m going to spend a few months of my time learning Yet Another Programming Language, I’d like it to be one that’s (smaller|simpler|easier|more consistent) than the ones I know already, not one that needs a big wall chart to summarize its operator precedence rules.

Ruby isn’t perfect, of course. I wish it had support for variable declaration, with an equivalent of use strict. Unfortunately, the Ruby zealots seem to have an unjustified religious objection to allowing variable declaration, and I was bitten by the lack of declarations twice last night alone. Still, I was writing proper OO code with recursion inside a couple of hours, and that has to count for something.

The other two big problems with Ruby are performance, and Unicode. It kinda lacks both. However, once Parrot has matured a bit, Cardinal should solve both problems at once.