File this under "claimed soccer is more boring than baseball - obviously not attempting rational argument".

ha! i like it. you make it and i promise i'll get started re-writing the Linux kernel!

I don't know much about Ada or Strongtalk, but I don't think Lisp or JS would be suitable for systems programming. From the little I know about Ada, it sounds possible that it would have been a good choice. What about D?

I wasn't referring to the difficulty of re-writing all the lines (the inertia factor). I'm genuinely curious what people who dislike C believe is now, or would have been then, a better language for the systems programming that C has been mainly used for.

Yes! And when I got it there wasn't much info about it online - I'm still not 100% convinced that it is real, even seeing it on Slashdot. It *screams* phishing - it's from domain that sounds similar to facebook, but isn't and it entices you to go somewhere that presumably will ask for personal information (the opt-out part). I'm not touching it with a ten foot pole until I hear more about it.

Having said that, I *would* like to opt out of the settlement. While I don't feel that any of my privacy rights were violated by a public site where I knowingly put certain personal information, I also don't have any interest in being a part of the legal extortion perpetrated by law firms who bring class action suits against large corporations where the class gets nothing and the firm gets millions. Read the fine print - the law firm is entitled to a third of that $9.5 million that will be donated to some random non-profit (anyone have information on them??). So for those keeping score at home, law firm - $3,166,666.00, facebook users whose privacy was supposedly invaded - $0,000,000.00. Makes my skin crawl.

Haha, maybe I prefer to think about hott nannies...

What should all those lines of C out there be rewritten in? What should they have been written in to begin with?

Ha! That's for the last part where you implied that Iran has shown a hottinanny of interest *who* is in the White House. Actually I guess that goes for the whole thing. The idea that Iran's current political direction has anything to do with the less-than-a-year-old presidency is disingenuously revisionist at best.

Can we both admit that "communicating" and "extending a hand to" are both woefully simplistic reductions of a complicated diplomatic process, and neither of them really mean anything? Yes, I would have liked Obama to publicly denounce the post-election crack-down, but I also think the administration's assessment that it would be detrimental to the movement was correct. The main propaganda tool used by Iran during that time was that they were putting down violent protests instigated by western powers intent on putting them out of business. That propaganda is more obviously a lie if we stay out of the fray - that may not have mattered to the protesters back then, but it does matter for every protest afterward (like the ones right now). How would speaking up have helped the protesters at that point anyhow? Unless we were willing to back up the words militarily, they would have only been detrimental to the movement. We were not then and are not now prepared to face off with the government Iran in a fight that is, at the end of the day, basically the people of Iran's problem.

Nothing. What do *you* think is wrong with communicating with one's enemies?

+1000 on your last paragraph.

In response to your first point - my thing is, how do you ever know when something stops being a fad? Was using 'C' a fad right when UNIX came out? Maybe it was, but it definitely isn't now, so when did it change. Was Java a fad when it first came out? Is it now? For those of who say yes and yes, what makes it so - a *huge* number of people use it to great success. Same goes for Ruby and Python.

Yeah I suppose it's tough to compare for all the reasons you mention (and probably more). By the way, while most popular libraries are still available on RubyForge, the bulk of newer and smaller libraries are on GitHub these days. The availability of distribution-packaged libraries is definitely a valid concern, but IMHO, rubygems are easier to use than CPAN and could or should be more widely distributed by default in the future. Food for thought!

Didn't mean to suggest a comparison with Perl 6, but rather Perl 5.

Don't see any difference in the requirement of mod_rails/etc. versus mod_perl/mod_php/fcgi for those languages. Impossible to argue about start-up time and performance in general, although I think Ruby is working more on that problem than nearly anyone right now (1.9/JRuby/Rubinious/etc.)

The community doesn't seem hugely different than others I have been part of (not many), but of course I'm somewhat of a n00b myself :) It is true that there are lots of "Rails programmers" out there who don't really know Ruby. You don't see that much elsewhere it doesn't seem.

It might just be because I'm not a very experienced Perl programmer, but I find the libraries in the ruby community to be easier to find, easier to use, and of generally higher quality. Could you point me to some examples of libraries that you use in Perl but could not find in Ruby?

Hmmm, I'm not sure in what ways Python could be considered in any way similar to VB, so I can't respond to that, but I thought someone should point out the irony of a Perl programmer being afraid of new tools. You sound just like the who were afraid of "scripting languages" back when Perl was an infant.

That sounds like violence to me...