No, this has nothing to do with the Emacs is like beer article. The article was about Emacs users and this is more about the critics of Emacs and Plone.
People (mostly vi users) laughed at Emacs, because it was a big, fat editor. "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" was the meaning of the name back then.
Today Vim isn't much smaller anymore and we hardly remember the time when 8 MiB of RAM were a lot of memory. Emacs looks relatively small when compared to big IDEs, written in Java.
That's similar to Plone.
Plone is an Open Source CMS written in Python. And it has the reputation of being fat and slow. A resource hog that needs a big server just to show a few pages in bearable time.
The speed got better from release to release and is still an important point in the development. But what's more important: Today's servers have more than just 256 MiB RAM, as recommended for a straightforward Plone site.
The server setup of plone.org:
You can get a similar system for about 60€/month from respected hosting companies.
We programmers are always looking for technology that scales and can handle many concurrent users. That's the reason for the rise of Erlang web frameworks and the downfall of Ruby on Rails. But most of the time our projects won't get as many hits in a year as Plone.org gets in a day. A medium sized server can handle more than one medium sized Plone site for you.
So, Plone is like Emacs. Once laughed at because of the size. But computers became bigger and faster, making this a non issue. What stays is the question of the complexity. To quote Wikipedia: Plone's weaknesses include Python and Zope experience requirements for those wishing to add or extend the feature set, making for a considerable learning curve for developers.
$ sudo ln -s `which python` /usr/local/bin/parseltongue$ grep -h import *.py|sort -u
from __future__ import with_statement
from cStringIO import StringIO
from ftplib import FTP
from xml.etree import ElementTree
import ConfigParser
import csv
import glob
import logging, logging.handlers
import os
import sys
import time
import traceback
import zipfile
$ python
Python 2.4.4 (#2, Apr 5 2007, 20:11:18)
[GCC 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import StringIO
>>> x = StringIO.StringIO(u"m\xf6p")
>>> import cStringIO
>>> x = cStringIO.StringIO(u"m\xf6p")
>>>
$ python2.5
Python 2.5 (release25-maint, Dec 9 2006, 14:35:53)
[GCC 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-20)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import StringIO
>>> x = StringIO.StringIO(u"m\xf6p")
>>> import cStringIO
>>> x = cStringIO.StringIO(u"m\xf6p")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf6' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
>>>You can find some snippets to make Python work with Haskell on PythonVsHaskell.
The code is for Windows, but it shouldn't be difficult to adapt this to Unix.
Finding this on a X vs Y page gives you some hope in humanity again. :-)
In the real world it isn't about which one is the ultimate programming language. When you think beyond this, you can choose more freely and combine the best of all the available tools for the job.
OCaml and Ruby can live together, too.
Even Common Lisp and Java can be used in one project without causing a rift in reality: CLiki page about Java
CommentsWillem Broekema announced CLPython in his news posting <1152045368.275100.86920@b68g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> today.
That's really crazy shit! (Meant in a good way! :-)
A Python implementation in Common Lisp. At the moment it's Allegro only, but in the future we could perhaps compile CLPython with Python to run Python ... (CMUCL's compiler is called Python, too. :-)
Sound's like fun.
By the way: There's a similar approach called Python-on-lisp. This project uses the real Python and builds a bridge to it.