Fourth ICFP programming contest

The results of the Fourth ICFP programming contest are out. The Dylan Hackers came second, mostly using Gwyddion Dylan, which the website says is still developmental. The write-up of the contest entry says that:

A major design goal of Dylan is to produce a language in which complex programs can be rapidly prototyped in the same way as with dynamically-typed languages such as Smalltalk or Lisp or "scripting" languages, while at the same time enabling performance comparable to statically typed languages such as C or ML.

Bruce Eckel not impressed by Ruby

Bruce Eckel is not impressed by Ruby. I've tinkered with Ruby and I like the object-oriented design but there are two reasons why I don't see myself doing much with it. First, it's not as concise as Perl for writing small scripts. Second, and more significantly, there are no Ruby libraries that make it worth my while learning it. By contrast, there are at least two Python molecular modelling projects, Pmv and MMTK, both of which are fairly mature and featureful. Even if I didn't care about Python having a cleaner design than Perl, these two libraries would be a compelling reason to learn it.