From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2004-08-29T23:21:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Typos (Was: performance comparison)

Hello Daniel,

DC> Hmmm... this sort of reminds me of a post I saw once of someone stating
DC> that if you didn't write your win32 programs in assembly you were going
DC> for the easy option and weren't _really_ a good programmer as you
DC> weren't thinking performance.

DC> I'm very far from considering myself as the prime example of a great
DC> programmer:) , however I'm sure that ruby has taught me a lot,
DC> especially in OO and general design of code. If using C or C++ I simply
DC> go for the "shortest route" possible to get results. In ruby it's not
DC> so. It's so flexible and encouraging that you actually _want_ to think
DC> of various possibilities to solve a problem and find the best fit (short
DC> term and long term). 

No this was not exactly my the point.

And remember that this thread was not about ruby as a programming
language. It started with Java and moving to whole language families
(static typed <-> dynamically typed).

Ruby is special here because it still is a freak language. Freak in
this context may be substituted with "nerd", "scientist" or "old wise
man". My statement may become more understandable when you look at
the popular scripting languages out there

- PHP
- Java Script
- Perl
- Visual Basic (for Applications)
- TCL
- Python
- Ruby

in this order. And only compare the professionals doing there work
in (at least one of) these languages. At least from my experience in
the last 10 years i see a correlation between the main languages and
there programming skills. I don't know exactly why but i think David
Ross's argument is one of the main reasons. Many of the buggy PHP and
Javascripts are out there because failures don't have serious
consequences and if a person did not learn (or forgot) to be afraid of
errors he stops thinking about it intensively. In germany we say "er ist
versaut f�rs Leben".

I see a huge problem with this in many Java apps where the normal
reaction is to say: "okay lets throw an exception" but the programmer
never tries to handle it somewhere else then in the main loop with a
catch all clause.


DC> It also depends on what your definition of a good programmer is.

A good programmer is someone who is able to analyse a problem and
create a software implementation that meets the goal, keeping all
contraints (security, performance, extensibility) in acceptable ranges
according to the problem domain and customer requirements.
This should happen in a reliable and fast way.


-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's