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Comment by astrec | Hacker News Reader

"Steve has engineered a kind of 'JavaScript on Rails' in order to fit into Google. All to avoid programming in Python."

If only it were true.

Steve wrote Rhino on Rails while working on a project that requires the JVM. At Google this infers a choice of Java, Python (Jython) or Javascript (Rhino).

Steve chose Rhino over Jython for reasons you can read about here: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rhino-on-rails.html

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+1 Obviously haven't read much Yegge when making statements like that. Ontop of the above defense, there's a video on Youtube...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1QD9XQm_Jd4

My fault, Steve has indeed explicitly said he could not use Python for that project.

But I somehow feel I'm not far from the truth, knowing his history of gentle Python bashing. After all, he chose not to make 'Django on Rhino'.

You really haven't read much Steve Yegge have you? He has his gripes (some of which have been recanted, mind), but he explicitly states he likes Python.

I'd say you're far from the truth.

I find it unfair to invoke Steve Yegge too often, since he's just a guy with an opinion. I have read a fair amount of his rants, of varying quality. His language comparative analysis is interesting because it is informed, argumented and ...well, funny. Read this passage, for example:

>Well, they're just like the Smalltalk folks, who waited forever to replace C++, and then Java came along and screwed them royally, and permanently. Oops. Ruby's doing exactly that to Python, right now, today. Practically overnight.

He just points out at some major architectural flaws in Python (like the scoping issues leading to selfSelfself and unreadable code, and then the whitespace...) and argues that Ruby has superseded both Perl and Python in many ways. That does not mean he does not LIKE Python. His is just an engineer's analysis, not an emotional judgement.

offtopic:

I -- on the other hand -- am emotionally scarred by Python having tried to take it into my system over a couple of years and having failed to love it. Then Ruby came along... ;)

What is the selfSelfself issue?

>Python's author, Guido Van Rossum, also made some boneheaded technical blunders early on — none quite as extravagant as Larry's blunders, but a few were real doozies nonetheless. For instance, Python originally had no lexical scoping. But it didn't have dynamic scoping either, and dynamic scoping may have its share of problems, but it at least sort of works. Python had NOTHING except for global and local (function) scope, so even though it had a "real" OO system, classes couldn't even access their own damned instance variables. You have to pass a "self" parameter to EVERY instance method and then get to your instance data by accessing it through self. So everything in Python is self, selfself, selfselfself, selfSELFselfSELF__SELF__, and it drives you frigging nuts, even if you don't mind the whitespace thing.

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/tour-de-babel

Thanks. I read the page and I still don't get it. You might use self.my_function() or self.my_variable. When would you see selfSelfself? Or is Yegge being a poet here?

Poetic license, yes.

And I have felt the same way, seeing "self" everywhere.

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