[Aaron-devel] What language to use for aaron (short and long term)?

[Sean C. <sea...@it...>]

	Alright, so here's the topic at hand: what language to use.  In
the interest of being obvious, I think it's a no-brainer that we want to
use C or C++ for the long term.  The speed and performance gains can't
be matched by an interpreted language.  Any objections to that? =20
Alright, now let's focus on the short term (up to version 1.0 See
ROADMAP for more details about 1.0 and beyond).


	I've been playing with Ruby for a while and finally went and
picked up a book on Ruby, Programming Ruby.  I'm stoked and sold.  Some
features of ruby that have convinced me to give it the go:  nice
exception handling, plenty of modules and support, threads, regular
expressions, pure OO language, hashes, forking, lots of socket support,
mutexes, and the language's design is elegant and well thought out. =20
	Compared to other languages that have been hacked together out
of need, Ruby is very well put together and it strikes me as elegant,
and that seems to be rare these days.  In terms of features and being a
developer, I couldn't hope for any more features to be included in one
language.  Ruby -> C shouldn't be too bad either.

	Why not Perl?  Threading is a nightmare-ish mess that won't get
resolved before perl6 (or that's what I fear).  Just firing up the perl
interpreter is pretty expensive operation (2MB base for each concurrent
operation?  No way).  All communication between processes would have to
be done over un-named pipes, which isn't bad, but managing a lot of
those can get ugly (esp to debug).  Setting up a messaging API for
pseudo-mutex locking would be hell and I'm not up for that.

	Why not PHP?  PHP's a web scripting language.  There's more
support for ruby than PHP in terms of app development and libraries. =20
'nuff said.

	Why not Java?  This answer'll come back to bite me someday, I
know it.  I just don't like Java.  Flat out: I've had bad experiences
with the language in terms of memory usage and performance.  The fact
that everyone preaches it as the solution to the world's hunger problems
and that it's been so heavily marketed is also disturbing.  The rate at
which they're pumping bozos who know only Java out of college these days
is also ticking me off.  It's a programming language or tool, not a way
of thinking and because I'm quasi-resentful of Java I'm tossing a big
'ole fuck you toward Sun.  Plus, Solaris is a clunky fucking operating
system when compared to BSD.  I dislike working on it but have to
support it and it irks me to death that it's so widely used yet so
poorly developed and thought out.  So blah, there's my opinion.


	More thoughts to come in responses to my own opinion.  -sc

--=20
Sean Chittenden