From: Stefan Matthias Aust Date: 2001-04-16T23:11:24+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:13702] Re: ANN: German Ruby article in the iX magazine (5/2001) Hi Clemens! On Mon, 16 Apr 2001 13:39:21 +0200, "Clemens Wyss" wrote: >Did my best to give Ruby a first positive appearance in the german >(IT-)publicity... > http://www.heise.de/ix/artikel/2001/05/078/default.shtml >In the article寄 discussion forum language war(s) have come up, but I am >pretty sure we can attract one or another to "give Ruby a chance". IMHO you did a great job. Your article made my eventually looking at Ruby after I stumbled across that language a few times in the past. Instead of working on a Java project I spend all my time this weekend experimenting with Ruby... I also read the articles from the (German language) discussion forum. I wouldn't call that a language war. Somebody seemed to like Perl better than anything else and two other guys tried to convince him that Ruby's advantage is the affinity with Smalltalk. Somebody else disliked the syntax and was "corrected" (I can't however agree that anything could be better than the beauty of the pure Smalltalk syntax :-) It seems that Ruby attracts a lot of people coming from an Eiffel or Smalltalk background who ever really liked languages like Perl, Python or even Java. I personally like Ruby because I'm such a guy and it contains enough Smalltalk to make me feel comfortable. I like the syntax, especially in contrast to Perl or Python (probably Ruby's main competitors). It has a few quirks, for example that "a.b[c]" can have a completely different meaning that "a.b [c]" but overall it's clean and easy to read. Currently, I'd have preferred if you would have to declare variables but at least a Ruby interpreter which could issue "read before written" warnings for local variables is thinkable. A small annoyance is IMHO that I cannot put umlauts in variable or method names and I'm even unable (using a Windows Ruby from the pragmatic programmer's page in a cygwin shell) to print umlauts. A program like "p '糜'" only emits "\344\366\374". RubyWin tries to print something different, probably Japanse characters. bye -- Stefan Matthias Aust \/ Truth Until Paradox