From: William Morgan <wmorgan-ruby-talk@...>
Date: 2005-02-19T01:01:46+09:00
Subject: Re: A Ruby-relevant quote from Alan Kay

Excerpts from Curt Sampson's mail of 18 Feb 2005 (EST):
> >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.

I don't know Smalltalk, so perhaps I'm misrepresenting your claims. But
I know Lisp and Scheme and I often see similar claims made by their
proponents.

I think syntatic elegance is a distraction. *Conceptual* elegance is
good, in terms of what the language allows one to do and how the API is
structured. But I would happily swallow any amount of irregular syntax
if it meant I had to hit fewer keystrokes to accomplish the same thing.

Yes, Ruby's block syntax is "irregular" in that we could just be using
lambda { } everywhere and have a nice uniform way for passing any number
of lambdas to a function. And Ruby code would be ten times as irritating
to write. Yes, we could replace variables with block-level "let/let*"
statements and do away with the "evils" of imperative languages. And
Ruby would be ten times as annoying to write.

(And this applies to modifying code too. If I want to do a quick
debug-by-printing, I don't want to have to move back and forth inserting
parentheses in weird places. Let me just insert a print statement with a
mininum of effort, for cryin' out loud.)

So, irregular/impure/non-elegant syntax doesn't bother me. Shit, I speak
English. Mainly I just want to type less.

> There will be a day when we nobody will take a language without
> continuations seriously, but that day is not here yet.

I dunno. In a language with threads and exceptions, I don't think
continuations are quite as useful as they once were. I've see one really
good usage in Ruby (generator.rb), and a couple "cute" uses.

> (And the day where nobody takes seriously a language without type
> inference is even further away.)

Couldn't disagree more about the desirability of that feature. But
that's another discussion. :)

-- 
William <wmorgan-ruby-talk@masanjin.net>