[ruby-talk:14566] Re: Ruby code: the lost generation

On Thu, May 03, 2001 at 08:23:40AM +0900, David Alan Black wrote:
> It seems to me that Ruby happens to excel in generating, or inspiring,
> a type of code which unfortunately falls right into the void between
> RCR and RAA.  I'm thinking of things like the by-products of RCR
> discussions.  Say we talk about Array#insert, or Array#to_h, or
> whatever.  Often, several suggested versions are perfectly respectable
> and useful in their own way.  Of course if the method is going to be
> part of the language then one version has to prevail.  But then the
> other ideas more or less vanish, at least from the communal radar.
> 
> The language-change/RCR process inevitably (and understandably) has
> this winner-take-all aspect to it.  On the other side -- as a possible
> first answer to the question of what to do with miscellaneous good
> code -- is RAA.  But the problem is that RAA lies too far in the other
> direction.  A five-line Array#insert implementation isn't going to end
> up on RAA.
> 
> It feels like a lot of Ruby energy gets dissipated, in the absence of
> some way to harness this realm of code.  Of course we can all
> cut-and-paste good code from ruby-talk -- and maybe it will turn out
> that any other approach ends up just being a fancy way to achieve more
> or less that effect.  But I do wonder whether there's some more
> systematic way to leverage the (to me) sometimes startlingly powerful
> little language enhancements and extensions that get thrown around.
> Some way for very small, even tiny, libraries and tweakings to travel,
> almost style-sheet-like, with larger bodies of code.  Or something.
I think I agree with him. How about something similar to the cookbook over at rubygarden? Perhaps we could even extend the mail server so that it will automatically extract, organize and post these bits of code to the wiki and then people could take from there adding comments bugfixes etc. Just a thought.