Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News) [LWN.net]

Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News)

Posted Feb 11, 2008 18:06 UTC (Mon) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712)
In reply to: Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News) by oak
Parent article: Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News)

There are GNOME and KDE bindings for Ruby and Python and there are some little things done in Python, I'm not aware of any Ruby applets though. I'm not aware of any really standard and common GNOME or KDE things written in Python, just some more fringe kinds of elements, like gDesklets.

So basically, if memory and speed are of a concern, both of these languages may be unsuitable.

The other thing that kind of rubs me with this kind of advocacy is that "ease of development" is placed high on the list but something as complex as a Browser or OpenOffice are sort of out of their range. Is it just me or is there a certain logical flaw to that? Do these languages really ease development if they are only used on a subset of applications that don't require start up speed, frugal memory usage, or any highly optimized portions? It seems to me that they "ease development" on a set of tasks that are pretty easy to begin with (not that that isn't a worthy use) which kind of begs the issue if you ask me. I'm not trying to be too argumentative but if we were to try and compare the relative "power" of Ruby and Python a good place to start might be by looking at the set of applications they are capable of being used for and those which they are ill-suited and looking for overlaps and exclusive portions.

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