From: James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@...>
Date: 2004-10-16T00:58:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Eating sandwiches in the park

Markus wrote:

> On Fri, 2004-10-15 at 08:27, James Britt wrote:
> 
> 
>>I spent a bit of time trying to create a good but short example of truly 
>>wack Ruby code.  Given that you can override core classes and methods, 
>>it is fairly easy to create code that bears only a superficial 
>>resemblance to Ruby, requiring the user to think  instead in a new, 
>>Bizarro world mini-language.  It requires nothing that doesn't already 
>>exist in Ruby.  Yet one does not often see this sort of code in the wild.
> 
> 
>      You see it (at least I do) but you don't recognize it as "a new,
> Bizarro world mini-language."  Why?  Because it's almost always done in
> the context of some problem domain that already supports it (sometimes
> with a history far predating ruby, or even computers).  Thus anyone who
> knows the language easily switches gears without even noticing.

Good point.  I have some Ruby code that does XML transformations sing 
the REXML pullparser.  I started out mapping input elements and context 
to new elements and context using Ruby hashes and arrays, but decided to 
(ironically, I suppose) use YAML, because it made it a bit easier to see 
that a) this was not really meant to be code as such (though of course 
it was), and  b) the syntax a bit cleaner for expressing the associations.

But there is likely an even more clear way to express the relationships, 
a transformation mini-language syntax, that would not be out of place in 
such a context.

 From what I gather, no one thinks it worth the effort to devise a new 
and arbitrary way to express common structures and behavior, but that 
for the unusual case, unusual syntax works quite well because you may 
want to explicitly encourage a mental context switch, a visual cue that 
tells the reader, Look, this is code, but it's special-purpose code.

> 
> 
>>Truth is, the cat's out of the bag, the genie is out of the bottle, and 
>>the poop is out of the mouse.  As new changes to the mallardability of 
>>Ruby are suggested, the question is not whether we want people to be 
>>able to do odd, weird, convoluted things; they already can.  The 
>>question is will the changes enable or encourage odd, weird, convoluted 
>>things that are indeed appropriate for a given task.
> 
> 
>      Exactly.
> 
> 
>>"Ruby: MPS-free for over 10 years!"
> 
> 
>     *laugh/gack*  Not another TLA!

Well, actually, it's YATLI (yet another three-letter initialism)

James