unCLog

I've been looking at Ruby quite recently while working on Montezuma with John Wiseman on a port of Ferret (which is a ruby port of the java Lucene text indexing engine). I don't see anything particularly special about Ruby; overall, it seems like another reinvention of the wheel with more syntax with which to be confused! That said, all these "scripting plus" languages do fit a niche that Lisp has not been able to play in because Lisp has too much baggage (in my holy opinion) and because Lisp qua Lisp is missing the batteries like sockets, web services, etc...

What I find most interesting, however, is the social phenomenon: why and how did Ruby and Python make it to the big time? Why did Harry Potter become such a hit? Ruby, Python and Harry are all good but none of them seem, to me, markedly better than their competitors... Who researches this kind of stuff? Are there papers out there that claim to explain what is going on? Tipping Point? Wisdom of Crowds. Where is Malcom Gladwell when you need him?

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