[conspire] CABAL meeting, Saturday, Feb. 8th!

[Nick Moffitt]

On 10Feb2020 10:43am (-0800), Deirdre Saoirse Moen wrote:
> I was hoping Ruby wouldn’t drop off so hard, but frankly its community hasn’t stepped up as much as Python’s has, and it’s tended to support the libraries more than the core. (And yes, I know, I’m part of this too.)

Ruby's a nice language! I think it helped break a lot of ice that Python later sailed through afterward, in terms of showing:

1: That the old ALGOL-related iteration structures weren't cutting it in the 21st century.  Whether we wanted cool message-passing tricks from Smalltalk or sequence comprehension tricks from Haskell, we just were getting tired of wrapping *everything* in 1960s-style loops.
2: That a novel mapping of MVC-style thinking into a template/dispatch/ORM/action model of Web development was a pretty good way forward.
3: That the world was actually ready to start adopting dynamic languages for serious stuff again.

1 and 2 were helpful for the progress of Python specifically, and #3 was more general in the adoption and uptake.