From: Gregory Seidman <gsslist+ruby@...>
Date: 2006-01-01T03:55:40+09:00
Subject: Re: About Steve Yegge's 'Opinions considered harmful' post

On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 02:52:56AM +0900, Ross Bamford wrote:
[...]
} It was just the before/after Rails thing really. I'd guess that a lot of  
} people whose first real exposure to Ruby came through the Rails hype (like  
} me) haven't used Rails much since. I know I find web programming extremely  
} boring (though it's good to know I can pull RoR out of the bag next time I  
} _have_ to go there so it won't be so bad) but for me the fun has always  
} been in exploring the language and finding uses for it.

I came to Ruby because I had been resisting learning Perl and Python for
years. Perl because of its unholy nastiness (I can still understand the
shell scripts I wrote a decade and a half ago; can anyone say the same
about a perl script written even a year ago?), and Python because of its
significant whitespace (there are those who say it's a feature; let's agree
to disagree). Finally, a scripting language with pleasant syntax, a strong
community, and a rich ecosystem of libraries springs up. Even better, it
has the main benefits of Perl (regex wizardry) and the good design sense of
SmallTalk. Once I learned about that stuff, I decided I would learn it.

Granted, it was not until I decided to develop a Rails app that I actually
got around to learning it. And I was delighted both by the ease with which
I developed the toy web app I was working on and the pleasure of using the
language itself.

Oh, and why did I actually need to learn a scripting language (other than
awk/sed/sh which I know well already)? I didn't. I just felt the itch to
learn a new language.

} I'm still amazed by how strong the Ruby community is so I'm probably  
} over-sensitive to anything that might cause the familiar old attitudes to  
} develop. Definitely didn't mean to make a big deal of it, it's probably  
} just that 'foo' / :foo thread exerting militant influences on me... :D

Heh. I read the first half-dozen posts of the symbol/string issue and since
then I have been deleting them by subject (actually by thread; yay mutt!).
It is the way of mailing lists.

} Cheers,
} Ross Bamford - rosco@roscopeco.remove.co.uk
--Greg