I was going to call this one "No blasters!  No blasters!" but it didn't make much sense, and two Star Wars titles in a row is too much for even a gigantic nerd like me to stomach.  Not that the current title is all that great...fuck it.

Anyway, whilst eating lunch with my pal B. Larsen* he mentioned the quintessential programming language shoot-out, which I had not seen in quite some time, and is worth taking a look at if you haven't seen it in a while.  It includes many hip new languages like Erlang and Ruby, and is quite detailed in how the languages are  benchmarked.

Among the most interesting pieces of information are the outliers.  Everyone knows C is fast.  But Haskell (a favorite of Larsen's) and Steel Bank Common Lisp (my langue de plume) both are much faster than I might have guessed.  And look at Ruby and PHP!  Ruby is 54 times slower than C!**  All this definitely makes  for some interesting discussion.  One cannot help but wonder why so many startups seem to favor such slow languages...




* His blog will likely never be updated again.  November!  Unbelievable.

** Yes, I know Ruby 2.0 will be much, much faster.  Even so, a great deal of web startups use Ruby NOW.  I question their judgment. 

 
 

There are certain computer programming languages now in use that attract a weird following.  Ruby has become a really fanatic-attracting language to the point where if I meet any Ruby developers at a party I just sort of edge away from them assuring them that I know exactly how awesome Ruby is and that I sacrifice a goat to Yukihiro Matsumoto every night, screaming and gibbering snippets of Ruby code while I slay the beast.

As weird and clique-y as they are, they always seemed kind of sane compared to the Rails people I met.  For those of you unfamiliar with this term, I congratulate you.  You are probably doing something important.  Even if you aren't, it's still sort of pleasing to me that you aren't familiar with this buzzword-laden nightmare, much less one of these deranged individuals trying to tell me that my CS degree was worthless, and that I should have focused in "business science" with a minor in "information." *

Now, I would like to start a startup.  And while that means taking a certain amount of good natured ribbing about Web 2.0, I am kind of tired of people assuming I am tasteless enough to use this shitheap.  And now I have been vindicated by an unlikely source:  a leader of the Rails community!

Or an ex-leader, I guess.  It's always kind of cool when someone fairly well-respected by a large group loses his shit and denounces his following.  Zed Shaw is the Jim Jones of Railstown.

I look forward to reading his updates, and so should you.  Another voice is added to my choir of profane blogs I check from work every day!



* Actual quote from Rails-jockey I met in Boston once upon a time.