From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2004-10-09T23:20:41+09:00
Subject: Re: ANN: Free-form-operators patch

Hi --

On Sat, 9 Oct 2004, Hal Fulton wrote:

> I stand by the abstraction: A sufficiently open system can be turned against
> itself to undermine that openness.
> 
> There are millions of ways to concretize that abstraction, but most of those
> are otherwise unrelated to each other, and they range from the momentous to
> the inconsequential. I have no reason and no desire to compare you to a terrorist
> or any other form of criminal.
> 
> If you don't believe there is such a thing as "too much flexibility," then we
> will have to agree to disagree.

Just so Hal doesn't feel all alone, I'll put in a note of skepticism
:-)  I'm not eager for Ruby to have, in essence, no fixed syntax.  I
think Ruby's strength lies largely in its specificity as a language --
a language that is good at domain-specific things, but still a
particular language -- and if it were turned into a kind of
proto-language, I would feel a sense of loss.  Also, I don't want to
have to learn new syntactic rules every time I want to read a program
or use a library.  

I know the argument gets made a lot that it can't hurt to have this
feature, that feature, etc., because no one has to use them.  I think
that misses the point, though.  It's like saying: a flute should have
strings like a violin, in case someone wants it to be a violin.  What
you end up with, eventually, is not a musical instrument but a kind of
buffet of characteristics, adding up to nothing.  I consider Ruby not
only an instrument, but a work of art, like a flute or violin.

The idea of something being treated as either a flute or a violin
sounds like duck typing :-)  What I'm saying, in those terms, is that
I don't consider Ruby itself to be a Ruby object.  It's
interesting....  I've thought for a long time that the flexibility and
dynamism of Ruby objects sometimes rubs off on people's views of the
language itself, so that the perception, expectation, or desire is for
Ruby itself to be untyped, open, malleable, and so forth.  (Or is that
'mallardeable'? :-)  I tend to think of Ruby, instead, as a quite
stable and distinctive thing whose stability supports the dynamism of
the objects.  

But at that level it's fine to agree to disagree; there is of course
nothing whatsoever wrong with experimentation.  I guess my more
concrete fear -- and I tend to feel this way about all interpreter
patches -- is that people will start releasing programs that depend on
the patch.  At that point, it would be better to do an outright fork
of Ruby.  But hopefully that won't be an issue.  Mainly I just tend to
agree with Hal that this particular change affects the whole profile
and identity of the language.  


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net