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A Little Anti-Anti-Hype
Author’s note
Some folks in the Python community got mad because I was hyping up Ruby. Bruce Eckel, a Python advocate, wrote a 2600-word manifesto called The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts, complaining that everyone was suddenly hyping Ruby, and that nobody is giving Python and Ruby a fair comparison.
This 1900-word riposte basically says, deal with it, hype is how the world works.
One thing I got wrong in hindsight: Objective-C is not better than C++. That was just me wishing for a better Smalltalk, which ironically Bruce Eckel accused Martin Fowler of in the same diatribe.
AI Notes
Bruce Eckel had posted "Anti-Hype," complaining that hyper-enthusiastic Ruby advocates were spoiling a good gentleman's argument about which dynamic language was better. Steve's reply: asking for a balanced, point-by-point debate is the most Python-community thing one can do — and is exactly how you guarantee your language will lose. Inferior languages win, he argues, and likely faster, because they take less time to get right. Java beat Smalltalk, C++ beat Objective-C, Perl beat Python ten to one. The body of the post is a tour of language-marketing case studies: Larry Wall and O'Reilly turning Perl into a movement by making it feel trustworthy and fun; Sun and IBM buying Java into the enterprise; Borland doing the same with Turbo Pascal. Python greets new users with FAQs that rationalise broken features, a REPL that refuses to quit when you type "quit," and a PEP process that makes every change feel like applying to graduate school. Steve catches five competing Python web frameworks against Rails' one and calls the fight — not on merit, but on hype, predicting Ruby will sit on resumes for the next decade.
Related listings
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2005
Lisp Wins (I think)
Same year — the language-merit half of Steve's 2005 survey. Anti-Anti-Hype argues that merit doesn't matter; Lisp Wins is what merit looks like when you take it seriously.
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2005
Ruby Tour
Same year — the love letter that makes Anti-Anti-Hype's marketing case concrete. Steve in the role of the enthusiastic Ruby evangelist Eckel was complaining about.
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2004
Tour de Babel
A year earlier — the broader language survey this piece is one tile of. Anti-Anti-Hype is Tour de Babel's marketing chapter, spun off into its own argument.