Month: July 2007

Ruby vs. Lisp

I’m certainly not the first to do this, but I felt like writing it. Comparing Ruby and Common Lisp: Syntax: Advantage, Common Lisp. No contest here. Ruby’s syntax is ugly, with all those ends hanging around and the { |var| … } block syntax. The one thing Ruby has going for it is conciseness. The…

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The Virtues of Static Typing

When I first discovered dynamically-typed languages like Perl and Ruby, I was convinced of their superiority to statically-typed languages like C++. No longer did I have to waste hours typing redundant type declarations or adding casts just to make the compiler happy. Dynamic typing allowed me to work quickly and unencumbered in what felt like…

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The Weirdness of C++

I’ve been dredging up my C++ for a class recently, and I’m struck by just how weird it feels now that I spend most of my time with Ruby. I was all proud of myself for remembering how to write a copy constructor. Then I ran into a situation like this: MyClass a = foo;…

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