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I had a colleague who was hostile to any language other than common lisp. Except python, which I assume is just because this page exists. What if norvig woke up

by nurettin 10mo ago

I had a colleague who was hostile to any language other than common lisp. Except python, which I assume is just because this page exists. What if norvig woke up that day and decided to write about Ruby instead?

pjmlp 10mo ago
Which incidentely has a much better history with JIT adoption than Python, where the community has largely ignored PyPy. Meanwhile Ruby has had MacRuby from Apple, later canceled, but the main developers went out creating RubyMotion. Sun toyed with JRuby, it was even officially supported on Netbeans, then Red-Hat supported the project for a while. It was also one of the first dynamic languages on GraalVM, with TruffleRuby. GraalPy effort only came a couple of years later, and is still on baby steps. As of 2025, the refernce implementation counts with YJIT, MJIT, TenderJIT, and MRuby 4 brings ZJIT to the party. Exchanging Lisp for Python we went backwards in regards to performance in dynamic languages, in a distopian world where C, C++, Fortran libraries are "Python" libraries. Nope they are bindings, and any language with FFI can have bindings to those same libraries, e.g. PyTorch can also be used in straight C++, or from Java.
- mistrial9 10mo ago
  Python community -- meet Schrödinger's cat
- nurettin 10mo ago
  Special mention and thanks to headius (Charles Oliver Nutter) for his contributions to JRuby, he enabled many of my cross-platform projects back in 201* which would have been harder to build without the expressive and terse syntax Ruby provides and the ability to run jvm pretty much anywhere.