From: "Benjamin J. Tilly" Date: 2001-06-08T01:07:29+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:16308] Re: Strange idea... exporting from a scope >===== Original Message From Dave Thomas ===== >"Benjamin J. Tilly" writes: > >> I write a lot of Perl. I have seen Smalltalk but not programmed in >> it extensively. I do not know what you mean by, "as you'd write >> Perl" or "as you'd write Smalltalk". Both languages support many >> styles and I believe that the style someone chooses has more to do >> with the programmer than the language. Which means that I don't >> know what style you expect people to associate with each. > >Whoa :) > >I wasn't being nasty about Perl style, nor about Smalltalk style. I >_was_ observing that there's a difference between the style you use in >the two. In Smalltalk, you don't think twice about writing lots and >lots of small classes. With the best will in the world, the inertia of >writing classes in Perl tends to mean I don't write so many. Well there is a difference in how I think in different languages. When I write Ruby I have no real choice but to use OO simply because other methods of sane code organization are not as readily available. In Perl I mix and match to the domain much more. I do a lot of simple modules that optionally export functions in a public API through Exporter. I generally prefer working that way. (I have discussed before how it seems that personality types seem to correlate with enjoying laying out OO class hierarchies...) >Reading my original, I can see why you might think that I was saying >that all Perl programs were monolithic, but that wasn't my intention. >I was simply trying to illustrate that languages can suggest a coding >style. > Languages can support styles. But the capacity to program in a style depends on the programmer. I think it might have been Matt Seargant who memorably said about why Perl has a maintainability problem, "It is the graduation from HTML monkey to CGI scripter." Cheers, Ben