Scripting is scripting

Last night, aliens abducted me and implanted a memory about visiting the Perl and the Ruby pages on Wikipedia.

To clarify, neither of those languages have been previously implanted on me, so I was just looking at the syntax and realized that I like those languages for the same reason I love JavaScript. There's so much potential for creativity! To contrast, compare to Java. There's soooo much to learn, and chances are, you'll never EVER learn all about the existing libraries, practices, policies, etc. It's massive and not very flexible. I have the impression that the C family is similar.

Javascript, on the other hand, is easy to learn. I mean, there's not that much regarding syntax BUT there's a myriad ways to write your code in crazy creative ways. It's precisely that lack of restrain that loosely-typed scripting languages provide that give you the freedom to get creative.

Sure, it's a double-edged sword. I've seen enough Java developers writing in JavaScript and thinking that's all there is to it. They don't realize that it's because it's flexible enough that you can somehow simulate Java with it.

I really want to try my hand at Perl. I already had significant respek for it just because of its regular expressions (isn't that a language by itself?), but last night I seriously wondered if I could get to be as good with Perl and enjoy it as much as JavaScript. Ruby is also looking very red and shiny.

What do I think is the secret? Being multi-paradigm. It's truly giving you the choice to implement the pattern that suits you best. It's not locking you into OOP; about allowing you to pass around everything and anything (functional); or to simply jot something down (procedural). If you think about it, all these three languages do that.

I'll post again in the future, when I've mastered those two and see if I still think so highly of them. Hopefully the aliens will save me the time and just implant that in me tonight.