Yet another mostly pointless language comparison using a single example that attempts to make some kind of conclusions others should listen to hit Digg this evening.

From a Ruby programmer’s perspective, I was a little upset that this guy clearly didn’t know how to program, or at least use Ruby. So, I’ve taken the liberty of cleaning up the Ruby example and posting the revised version here

He made a claim that Ruby was the second longest example due to all the end lines. Here’s the count using my updated version of his code:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

aluminum:~> grep -v '^#' *.py | wc -l
     213
aluminum:~> grep -v '^\/\/' *.java | wc -l
     282
aluminum:~> grep -v '^\/\/' *.cpp | wc -l
     325
aluminum:~> grep -v '^#' *.rb | wc -l
     170
aluminum:~>

P.S. Lazyweb, anybody know of a more idiomatic method of doing what he does with the copy method? I replaced some of his calls with Object#dup, but some were basically reinitalizing self, which dup doesn’t do.