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About 6 months ago I decided to learn either Python or Ruby because I wanted a language to write webapps and simple computergames fast.

I kind of tried both for a while and Python gave the better impression in every way, readability, ease of use, libraries, documentation, expressiveness etc.

But there are so many really enthusiastic posts about Ruby and while Python has a lot of users and is very popular and successful I rarely see anyone rave about it. But maybe that just means it has gotten mainstream.

But anyway I like the Python philosophy that there should preferrably be one obvious way to do things. While similar in most ways, there the languages differ.

So, what do you Rubyists like so much about Ruby? Especially what do you think Pythion lacks?

because flash sucks?

Just got to say this to all you netbeaners, eclipsers etc out there.

Today i finally groked what makes Emacs so good. I havent groked Emacs itself yet but all the IDEs i have tried have disappointed, they are big, slow and ugly and hard to navigate easily and there is a lot fo unnecessary clutter which you sometimes can and sometimes cannot take away.

Emacs has a bit of a barrier of entry but as soon as you learn some keyboard-kung-fu it will make you very productive.

Jump between buffers, run an interpreter, search your code, etc.

So powerful and so elegant. Emacs captures the essence of good software.

I'd wish people stop post all crappy blogposts about shallow language-comparisons.

Saying language X does Y in 4 lines instead of language Zs 5 lines just doesn't say much unless you put it in a bigger perspective.

(And I like Python very much and hate Java).

P vs NP is a pretty real problem, complexity theory is superimportant.

People how can't do proper Big-O-analysis are forever doomed to suck at programming.

I am curious about computational complexity, P, NP and so on.

Wikipedia gives a good basic insight but doesn't go very deep.

What books do you recommend? Plus points for one that discusses how parallelism fits into this.

If you don't undertand complexity and algorithms you will likely run in t huge performance problems at some point and that will make your whole program useless.

No matter the type of programming complexity and algorithms is involved.

So it is more like saying "not understanding how a car works will make it very hard for you to design or build one".

Going through SICP, in the last lectures they are going through register machines, compilers etc.

Abelson mentions a for LISP-chip/machine that was more parallelized(yeah spell that) than an ordinary chip.

What was the advantage/disadvantage with LISP-based machines?

They were more expensive I have heard, but why? Harder to make because they needed more parallelisation or just because there was less demand for them?

Are new multicore computers more like LISP-machines were?

Some relevant links: http://pt.withy.org/publications/LispM.html http://fare.tunes.org/LispM.html http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~weel/lispm.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machines This is cool, didnt know of it before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_architecture

Didn't think I'd be the one to say this since my first reaction to Hacker News was that I was very turned off and offended by downvotes without motivations.

My rule is: * Upvote good posts that you agree with. * Comment on posts you disagree with or want to add something significant to. * Downvote only when people write racist stuff etc.

But lately the forum has been filled with links that are irrelevant, blog posts with very low quality etc and the only way I can disagree with them is to answer them but I don't want to because that brings attention to them in the form of many replies plus it makes me waste my time on them which is what I don't want to.

So why isn't there a downvote for OPs/links?