Unfortunately I haven't tried them all... yet :) but my current favorite (other than Perl of course) is Ruby. Beautiful OO, and very easy to learn coming from a Perl background. While there's no Ruby Monks yet, there is a Ruby Garden and some good mailing lists.

For the interested, there's also an excellent book available online that will give you a good feel for the language.

Hey, Ruby Garden is in PHP. I prefer web sites where people eat their own cooking. ;-)

They'll be able to run a Ruby-based system similar to the Everything Engine once the admin of this project gets off his lazy ass and releases some code ;).

I've glanced at Ruby before, probably after someone remarked on how clean it is. I just took another look this afternoon, and was once again found myself ready to abandon the attempt without doing anything useful, for the usual reasons:
• Lack of documentation: If I write a method that takes a block, how do I then pass that block on to another method? The introductory guides give examples, but no general rules for how blocks work. After a bit of searching, I found the Pragmatic Programmers' guide which, although good, appears to be at least a year out of date. And I still haven't found the answer, though I'm not done searching. Then again, maybe I'm just slow or something.
• Hackishness: The syntax is usually clean, friendly, DWIM, and the like. But when you look at some of the corner cases, it gets frightening. Take a look at this from the doc:

  When Ruby sees a name such as ``a'' in an expression, it needs to determine if it is a local variable reference or a call to a method with no parameters. To decide which is the case, Ruby uses a heuristic. As Ruby reads a source file, it keeps track of symbols that have been assigned to. It assumes that these symbols are variables. When it subsequently comes across a symbol that might be either a variable or a method call, it checks to see if it has seen a prior assignment to that symbol. If so, it treats the symbol as a variable; otherwise it treats it as a method call.

  So if I add a local variable "foo", it can silently mask subsequent calls to a function "foo" that I've been happily calling for a month? Yikes. Sure, Perl has some wierd things going on in places, but they mostly just show up in golf games.
Don't get me wrong -- it's a fun, interesting language; if you squint a bit, it's clean at a higher level. But it still seems like a hack, not a solid foundation for software. I wouldn't trust it with my file system.

/s

I am one monk who feels strongly about Ruby -- strongly in favor. My main project right now (I'm a teenager -- no job) is in Ruby, so I've gotten to know if fairly well.

As to the lack of documentation. It's true that there's not a lot, but what's out there is good stuff. And the Pragmatic Programmer's guide may be a year old, but it most certainly is not a year out of date. After all, languages don't change that much.

It is possible to receive a block and then pass it on, it's just not introductory guide material. :-) Here's an example

class Foo
     def initialize #no initialization needed for this class
     end

     def bar(&block)
         self.baz(&block)
     end

     def baz
          yield(3)
     end
end

foo = Foo.new
foo.bar { |n| puts n } # prints "3\n"
[download]

When you talk about adding a local variable that masks calls to an earlier added function of the same name, you forget something: Ruby is an object-oriented langauge. You're supposed to call functions on objects, which can't be confused with a variable. In a class definition, you call one of that class's methods like self.method or like method, which is merely a shortcut for the former. It calls that method with that instance from the class.

This was also discussed at Ruby: An Abbot breaks silencewind. If you haven't checked it out, check it out. It's not better or worse than Perl -- it's different, and I love them both.

elusion : http://matt.diephouse.com

Argh! Stupid radio buttons!

I went with C, mostly because it's wonderfully low-level and lets you do some pretty amazing things with memory management. (Lest I start a flamewar, I'll also point out that it lets you do some excruciatingly harmful things with memory mangement.) And because I'm a graphics geek, and C is the best language out there for putting lots of polygons onto the screen really fast.

But I also like C++, because it's mostly like C and has a wickedly featureful OO model. (I actually write most of my graphics code in C++, because of the OO model.)

And I like Haskell, because it's an excellent clean functional language, and it taught me just how cool curried functions and first-class-object functions can be.

And I like LISP, because it's ridiculously tight on the syntax and has pretty much every feature you could ever want. It's like programming with nothing but NANDs, but fun.

And, truth be told, I like 68000 assembly language, mostly because I learned x86 asm first and the 68k just seemed so damn elegant in comparison.

So those are my favourite programming languages, other than Perl. But I only got to choose one. Dammit.

--
:wq

Argh! Stupid radio buttons!

My thoughts exactly. What about a pre-poll poll to determine which languages should make into the final poll? sed and PostScript really should have made the list.

But I'm really surprised awk didn't make it in there. It disturbs me a bit that I was stuck voting for C++. I know I'm not the only person who got sucked into perl after pushing awk beyond the limits of what it was originally intended to do. sigh

Yep. I voted for "other" simply because awk wasn't there. I used awk on unix and DOS (yay Thomson Toolkit), and found myself writing awk scripts that wrote their own batch files and then called those batch files to continue the processing. Ah, the good old days. It was indeed outgrowing awk's limits that led me to Perl.

These days I still find myself using awk for one-liners, because it's more compact for saying things like '{print $4}' that the corresponding Perl code.

Awk really was a godsend after having dealt with only grep and sed. I no longer remember any sed, and that's a Good Thing.


print@_{sort keys %_},$/if%_=split//,'= & *a?b:e\f/h^h!j+n,o@o;r$s-t%t#u'

Argh! Stupid radio buttons! ... So those are my favourite programming languages, other than Perl. But I only got to choose one. Dammit.

Hmmm.... seems to me that the solution lies in instant runoff voting, as neatly explained here, by the muppets.

I'll just go and post a Discussion about it...

Andy.

PS: Joke

They contain a lot of features that Larry no doubt considered when designing Perl (since he's been around for a while). Ralph Griswold, a old-time language design guru and advisor of mine at the U of Ariz, wrote both of them, so I guess I'm pretty biased.

Snobol had the novel idea of success or failure of each line of code and allowed you to put optional goto's at the end of each line of code (shudder). You could compile code on the fly (ala eval).

Icon allowed you to get into the guts of the pattern matching behavior, allowing you to use generators (kind of like closures) and explicitly controlling backtracking. Actually it's pattern matching was too low level for me and Perl's re matching is much easier to deal with on a day-to-day basis. At a later time, they instrumented the interpreter and you could write hooks that allowed you to graphically see how algorithms executed in it. You could do things similar to the way that ActiveState's Komodo allows you to view an re as it matches text, but much more as well.

Both of these had dynamic data types and automatic garbage collection to make the programmer's life easier.

Ok back to reality - Perl has fixed a lot of the warts that they had though ...

bluto

What? No one votes for Python?

Look, I love Ruby and all (I reallyreallyreally do) but where would Ruby have been without Python to be it's father (Perl being is mother, and Smalltalk being the milkman).

Of course, even Python doesn't compare to befunge . . .

()-()
 \"/
  `                                                     

Drat, you beat me to it =P
definately ditto.
Or maybe befunge..

You should try Java. It is very well designed and garbage collection takes away all that 'having to walk down the driveway' stuff. No but really it scales very well too. The only problem with Java is, is that it is not Perl. With Java you have to think(just hacking causes mental stress with the java compiler) whereas with perl you just slip on your favourite hacking shoes and away you go. I see VB scattered here and there, has the world gone mad!! VB is /(s?hMit)*/ and the syntax is crap(what's wrong with ending statements with a ';'? Also the fact that VB keeps you on a windows computer is a travesty. Once I have finished my next VB project I am kicking MS out(it hasn't paid its rent). So java says goodbye(am I sinning in the Monestry with this): public class Goodbye { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Goodbye"); } } // Fu^k print "Goodbye"; Now thats better.

Gotta love the turtle.

Just for kicks, here's another Logo implementation, this one written in C: Berkeley Logo.

And, just for a few more kicks and to show that Logo isn't just for graphics, here is Brian Harvey's sample program from the linked page (it generates combinations from a list of lists):

to choices :menu [:sofar []]
if emptyp :menu [print :sofar stop]
foreach first :menu [(choices butfirst :menu sentence :sofar ?)]
end
[download]

Speaking of LOGO Turtles I have one of the old Terrapin(TM) Turtle robot but haven't found only information about how ot get it working. Anyone know how to control them? No Terrapin::Turtle module in cpan

|\_/|
/o o\
(>_<)
 `-'

I prefer to have physical evidence of my programming; that's why I program in Chef!

perl -pe '"I lo*`+$^X$\"$]!$/"=~m%(.*)%s;$_=$1;y^`+*^e v^#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'

I've used many of the other languages listed, but don't really care for any of them (Assembler, Basic, Fortran, Pascal, JavaScript, Visual Basic).

As mr_mischief mentioned I was also fond of Rexx--which I also used for glue purposes but once we switched from an IBM mainframe to Solaris boxen, both PL/I and Rexx fell by the wayside. It was a couple of years before I found out about Perl so we made due with fortran, shell scripts and SAS. HEY! What about SAS? True it started out as a statistical analysis application, but the ease with which you can sort and merge data sets is remarkable (plus the data manipulation tools aren't too bad).

--Jim

C=64 basic - ugly as hell, but my first language
C=64 Assembler - so incredibly fast in comparison with C=64 basic
680x0 Assembler - the most readable assembly i know
Pascal - thank god I only had to use it one for 1 trimester
Prolog - Apart from the fact that it's so useless, i really like recursion with backtracking
Perl - the best example of a computer-language designed for comunication between humans.
C - Like assembly, but less readable ;-)
C++ - C, but with OO and (I think) nicer syntax.

-- 
Joost       downtime n. The period during which a system
            is error-free and immune from user input.
[download]

Fortunately for you BASIC has risen from the dead. It's now been ported to the Parrot runtime engine. And for you naysayers who think BASIC is all washed up, it's even more advanced than Perl 6!

Feature	BASIC	Perl 6
Easy to learn syntax	Yes!	Still Unknown
Large base of existing software	Yes!	Still Unknown
Speed	Faster than Perl 6!	Stationary
Runtime	Parrot	Still unimplemented

And much, much more.

:)

Can anyone here say Gorrilla Basic?, ok then nibbles? :>

"Your baudrate depends on the size of your pipe". -ALex Simonelis

I had to hit the C++ button. Other languages may be a tad quicker (Assembler, C), easier to use (Java), or more Perl-like (Ruby, Python) but I find C++ and Perl to just work well together in the toolkit.

Perl's great for most things, and I only look away from it when I need raw speed. This pretty much rules out most of the languages listed. I used to reach for C in my youth, but now reach for the C++ and feel slightly happier with the OO and so forth..

When things need waking I reach for the printed perlguts and XS references and try and recall the stuff I taught myself last time I needed waking. It's slowly settling round my brain now though.

Since a friend is holding a gun to my head, I had to vote PHP. I am truly sorry... this is not the way I feel... I mean I love PHP! (call for help!)

work it harder make it better do it faster makes us stronger more than ever hour after our work is never over.

I liked Qbasic over GWBasic when it came out, eventually BasicPDS was the cream of the crop because it compiled exe's the size of C compiled code. Compared to C, C was only a tad faster with string manips. The core compiler for BasicPDS was C based. I still remember writing ISAM apps, better than the other DB's at the time. Then came VB, hated VB for DOS, but VB was ok.

I still think back to the days of my C64 and C128, using Basic 2.0 and Basic 7.0, although 7.0 was very much like Simon's BASIC which was really good. I miss the monitor tool to look at live memory, and see how the code looks in memory. :) Man, ever wonder how many hundreds or thousands of programs and scripts you ever wrote over the years.

I've been working with Perl for about 2 years, and it's become my new love. :P I do ALMOST everything in Perl! The syntax in Perl is also helping me learn C.

I gave up on VB when 6.0 came out - I was so disgusted I deleted from the drive, and started learning Perl,SQL, and C/C++.

I'm still trying to understand the niche for pointers in C. Maybe one day they will click. As for the syntax, syntax is syntax.. once you got the logic, any language becomes fun.

~bud

Edit kudra, 2002-05-09 Added p tags

Pointers in C?
One great use would be linked lists. Although I first learned about those in Ada, you should be able to do the same in C.


Although you probably already knew that one... :)

#VRML V2.0 utf8

PROTO doorx [
   field SFVec3f t 0 0 0
]
{
   Transform {
      translation IS t
      children [
         DEF doorts TouchSensor {
         }
         DEF ts TimeSensor {
            cycleInterval 10
            loop FALSE
         }
         DEF pi PositionInterpolator {
            key [
               0 .1 .9 1
            ]
            keyValue [
               .25 0 0 .75 0 0 .75 0 0 .25 0 0
            ]
         }
         DEF pi2 PositionInterpolator {
            key [
               0 .1 .9 1
            ]
            keyValue [
               -.25 0 0 -.75 0 0 -.75 0 0 -.25 0 0
            ]
         }
         DEF tr Transform {
            translation .25 0 0
            children [
               Shape {
                  geometry Box {
                     size .5 2.5 .01
                  }
               }
            ]
         }
         DEF tr2 Transform {
            translation -.25 0 0
            children [
               Shape {
                  geometry Box {
                     size .5 2.5 .01
                  }
               }
            ]
         }
      ]
   }
   ROUTE ts.fraction_changed TO pi.set_fraction
   ROUTE pi.value_changed TO tr.set_translation
   ROUTE doorts.touchTime TO ts.set_startTime
   ROUTE ts.fraction_changed TO pi2.set_fraction
   ROUTE pi2.value_changed TO tr2.set_translation
}
[download]

|\_/|
/o o\
(>_<)
 `-'

Given perls heritage I am *really* surprised there is no generic shell option here to cover the various sh, ksh, sed, awk, etc... left me with no choice other than "other" :-(

--
my $chainsaw = 'Perl';

I have only used a few languages over my short career and after Perl, Java has to be my favourite, it is the teaching language of my university's CS department, but that never put me off. I can't choose a worst between Object Pascal and Visual Basic, thankfully I haven't had to do too much with them. Object Pascal has your cartesian products, but is not Huffman coded and has other unsightly syntax features. Visual Basic is easy to get things going in but was so unintuitive for me, even though I loved my Commodore 64 BASIC. I never wrote anything useful for my C64, but I loved drawing my own sprites and peeking and poking that 64K of RAM. Now the sound chip is bust, but I have an emulator for when I need a quick classic game.

I have a wiry brain/each eye a camera. Robot Tourist, by Ten Benson

Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say PL/SQL. Or any database programming language for that matter. Most of my perl coding is database related, including writting API's for various projects, and stored procedures, combined with a perl front-end, can't be beat.

I'm just wondering, do people not consider these programming langauges? I know the poll couldn't list every language but there was nothing database related in the poll.

Befunge rulez!!!

Truly and everlastingly!

!v1.s vv"Just another Perl/Befunge hacker"*25 #v#<!
<<    q>:#,_@>;print/"(.*?)"/,$/;  just_sketch   ^0
[download]

I'm learning Perl. And I haven't paid anything for it yet. Everything has been free, including this monastery.