Wow, there were lots of responses to the LineNoise and PythonAndRuby postings last week. Here’s some of the feed back.

On Line Noise

First of all, let me remind everyone that a line noise score is for entertainment purposes only, and trying to derive something deep or serious about a language from its line noise score is counterproductive.

Brian Marick reminded me of a signature survey that Ward Cunningham had done. Ward throws out all but a few characters to generate a signature for a Java file. Surprisingly, you can tell a great deal about a file from the signature. Check it out here.

James Robertson wonders how Smalltalk would fare against the line noise filter. There is some question how to exactly count Smalltalk code, since there is no standard text representation for Smalltalk. I tried the fileout format from Squeak and removed all the extra puctuation that is added during fileout. Here is my results for Smalltalk …

  animal.st (45): :#:'':'':'':'':''.:#:'':'':'':'':''.:=:.:[:|]

James came up with a score of 35, but on his own source code running on a different version of Smalltalk. A lot of the Smalltalk score came from the class declarations, and if VisualWorks differs from Squeak significantly in the way classes are declared, that could easily account for the difference.

Ted Leung would like to see a larger sample. He suspects that the Ruby line noise ratio would be higher. Perhaps, but I haven’t seen it. From the very little research I’ve done, Ruby and Python get roughly the same line noise score on larger files.

On Python and Ruby Mindsets

Richard comments on the PythonAndRuby posting and complains about my characterization of the Python "." operator. He says

"x[y]" is a dictionary lookup. "x.y" is an attribute lookup that can have nothing at all to do with a dictionary.

He mentions that the __ getattr __ and __ getattribute __ hooks in Python may redirect the "." operator so that no actual dictionary is used. He suggests "attribute lookup" would be more accurate.

His terminology is probably more accurate, and I was delibrately glossing over the details. But the main point that Python programmers view the "." as some type of lookup is still very pertinent.

The Right Attitude

In the midst of all these Python and Ruby comparisons, I would like to wrap up with a posting from Mauricio Fernandez’s blog. Mauricio recounts a conversation with a stranger on a plane where they discuss design patterns and dynamic languages.

It was only much later that I remembered that he told me he was a Pythonist. This means (obviously) that we should have fought to death. Too bad we forgot it ;)

I like that attitude!

Thanks to everyone for the feedback.