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RedHanded

No-no Sweet Guido: Ruby is Oriental, not Occidental #

by why in cult

Story goes: someone at Amazon DevCon asked Python creator Guido about Ruby. And he goes, “seems like an accident attempt in cleaning up Perl.” Gulp.

Was anyone present for this? Did he have his collar upturned and his shades on? Too cool for school, Guido. (via ~matz)

So: I guess another scribe recorded “excellent” rather than “accident”. From now on, let’s operate on the assumption that he said “excrement.”

No, seriously, “excellent” makes more sense.

said on 26 Jan 2005 at 14:08

Does anyone else continually wish they could read japanese and in turn read Matz’s blog?

Anyways, seems to me to be a bit uncouth of Mr. van Rossum. What better way to start flame wars then unnecessary comments like this. Not to mention from a language developer.

/me slaps Guido with a large rubber firetruck.

said on 26 Jan 2005 at 14:13

playing devil’s advocate: if you look here you can find an almost identical report. the only difference is that “accident” is reported as “excellent”.

Being an “excellent attempt” is a compliment, imo :)

said on 26 Jan 2005 at 14:22

In the comments for the second link, the author says that they may have misheard because they were in the corner!? We need a third blog about the Q&A!

said on 26 Jan 2005 at 14:33

...maybe he said “axe-ellent” to both compliment Ruby AND make reference to The Pickaxe?

said on 26 Jan 2005 at 15:10

/me throws the rubber firetruck in the fire…

Guido!, oh Guido will you ever forgive me?

said on 26 Jan 2005 at 17:45

Note that I don’t care for he phrase “accident attempt”, which may be true. I quoted it just because it soundded funny.

said on 27 Jan 2005 at 01:18

I transcribed that quote.

I thought that he said “accident attempt”, but later realized that the other blogger convering Guido thought that he had said “excellent attempt”.

This is the second talk I’ve seen Guido give, and I don’t think he was being particularly mean or cruel. It seems to me that perl—its cruft and its human irregularity—turns him off a great deal, and anything that reminds him of that just doesn’t feel right.

I like ruby a lot, and have done more work in ruby than in python, so I don’t think I transcribed it so because of some implicit bias.

Looking back, it does sound funny, but I blame ut on my lack of experience in transcribing Dutch-born speakers :)

said on 27 Jan 2005 at 09:38

Cool, thanks for the report, awu. Where you the one who asked the question?

said on 27 Jan 2005 at 09:52

“Being an ‘excellent attempt’ is a compliment, imo :)”

Sure, and Python is an excellent attempt at cleaning up ABC .

Sorry, but the word “attempt” suggests that the goal was not reached. As in, “Nice try.”

said on 27 Jan 2005 at 11:06

I’m okay with Guido’s reaction. It’s like matz says:

No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it’s not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.

The Philosophy of Ruby

said on 28 Jan 2005 at 01:27

I don’t see Ruby as a “rewrite” or “cleaning up” of Perl. Ruby begins with a pure OO design and later borrows syntaxes from other languages, including Perl.

Sorry to sound disrespectful, but I think over the years Guido is becoming more and more uninsightful, uninformed, rude, and arrogant. His attempt to make Python3000 case insensitive did it for me. From then on I’m not interested on whatever he has to say…

said on 30 Jan 2005 at 21:44

You are almost as cool as “pure OO”!

said on 23 Jun 2005 at 19:09

His attempt to make Python3000 case insensitive did it for me.

As an occasional user of Delphi, I’m inclined to think that maybe case-insensitivity IS the right way to go.

It could be one of those things that turn you off when described on paper, but actually makes a lot of sense once you actually start using it. Much like enforced indentation.

said on 30 Nov 2005 at 23:06

hmm … you know, case sensitiveness isnt so important from a thought-point of view.

after all its still the same information expressed in a script.

However my current style of coding is to like case

and actually I am a guy that like to do a lot of UPPERCASING when writing in php and use _ underscores…. ruby forced me to change this.

I dont really so much mind, I was happy to get rid of the annoying ; to end a line. This was why I think both ruby and python look better than php – more beauty. In python nicely by omitting ending clauses. In Ruby … well ok i am sold for it. I dont like 100% but about 99%.

And i am also learning Python slowly… step by step.

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