From: Joao Pedrosa <joaopedrosa@...>
Date: 2005-02-18T18:20:08+09:00
Subject: Re: A Ruby-relevant quote from Alan Kay

Hi,

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 16:43:17 +0900, Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Feb 2005, Adriano Ferreira wrote:
> 
> > Without offense, one can say that Ruby is Smalltalk made right (or at
> > least one way to make it right).
> 
> If if by "making it right" you mean going back to imperative languages
> and irregular syntax.
> 
> Smalltalk already had pretty good iterators; why add the imperative
> "while"? Smalltalk itself is so powerful that it doesn't even have an
> "if" statement. Ruby is that powerful too, but a lot more awkward.
> (It's probably more awkward because it does have an "if" statement and
> therefore never had to make things like a generic block statement that
> was as syntatically light as possible.)
> 
> And I find the highly irregular syntax very frustrating. What does
> something in braces mean, for example? It depends on where it appears
> in the program. Why do I use one syntax when passing only one block to
> a method, but a different syntax when passing two? And so on. Irregular
> syntax combined with too many different ways of doing things makes
> learning much harder, becuase you can't naturally work out how to do
> things, you need to discover the tricks.
> 
> (I just about fell over when I discovered you could use "rescue" before
> "end" for a function, as well as after a "begin." But you can't use it
> for "if". There seems to be no logic you can use to guide you to say
> where you can and can't use it.)
> 
> I think ruby has been reasonably successful for a couple of reasons.
> 
> 1. One thing it did get right was to integrate well into the Unix
> environment. If we had a good Smalltalk that did that, I'd be all
> over it.
> 
> 2. Java has been around along enough that many programmers have absorbed
> the incremental improvements it offered over C++ and other languages of
> the day, and are now starting to discover how backward in many was Java
> really is. So now they're ready for another incremental improvement--but
> not one that's to big. Not a language, for example, without "if" statements.
> 
> Ruby did get some other stuff right, such as having continuations in
> the language, but I don't think that sort of thing was much of a factor
> in its success. There will be a day when we nobody will take a language
> without continuations seriously, but that day is not here yet. (And the
> day where nobody takes seriously a language without type inference is
> even further away.)

Nice post. Maybe Smalltalk is more like the old Unixes and Ruby is
more like Linux. Do you like Linux/FreeBSD, by the way? :-)

Cheers,
Joao