Why Ruby > Python

Lately, I've been hacking around a bit with ruby and I must confess, I've started to like it quite much. In particular, there are some things which I like much better than in python. And no, this won't be all about the enforcing nice syntax.

So here are the things I consider a big win:

• Extendable standard classes There is some nice feature for strings which the ruby developers missed? You can just add it to the String class. No need to derive your special MyStrings, or anything.
  
• Blocks Okay, it took a while to get used to this, but once you understood how it works, blocks allow you to extend the ruby language by new syntactic constructions (well, mostly loops, but you can also use them for resource management. Just pass out a handle to an object and take care of the proper cleanup afterwards. Ruby's open can be used like this). Also, I find blocks much cleaner than iterators, since the whole loop logic is encoded at a single place (instead of being split over two or three functions)
  
• Function calls without parenthesis Again, you can write new functions and really extend the ruby syntax. Paired with introspection, you can write quite powerful class modifiers and call them in a clean, simple syntax. This is heavily used by rails, for example.
  

Okay, for me the biggest problem with ruby is a lack of a large numeric and matrix library. Python with its scipy it clearly ahead in this respect. There exist ruby bindings of the GNU Scientific Library, but it lacks the lapack functions which means that, for example, the eigenvalue functions are not really fast.

That, and that ruby is reported to be somewhat slower than python. But maybe that changes with the next version which will include a virtual machine... .

SICP

Some time before I began studying computer science, I heard of the book "structure and interpretation of computer programs". As I was always on the search for new, life changing computer languages (as someone once said: "A programming language which does not change the way you think about programming is not worth learning"), I was quite eager to get my hands on the book. However, it was out of print back then, or at least impossible to get in Germany for an agreeable price.

So I started to learn scheme from the official standard document which turned out to be rather painful. Anyway, years passed by, I learned C++, finally got back to C, learned python, then ruby, played a bit around with haskell, and emacs lisp. And suddenly I learn that the whole book is online.

Well, turns out that ten years later things are maybe not that exciting any more, but still, maybe this book can still change your life ;) Who knows what I'd be doing now if I read this books back then... .

Palm cancels Foleo

It seems that palm has canceled the Foleo just a few weeks before its official release. This must have been a very hard decision, after building up all that expectation and being almost ready to ship the product.

I have personally owned Palm PDAs for the last few years. Let's say that overall it was a pleasing experience (including some killer-apps like Kanji Gym), although in terms of stability Palm was always a bit of a nuisance. Maybe the most amazing thing is that I never lost data during the countless soft-resets. Now if I think about it, syncing the Palm has become quite of an issue lately... .

Anyway, if they manage to focus all their efforts on finally releasing the next (hopefully more stable) PalmOS, this might eventually turn out to have been the right decision.