From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2006-01-09T17:40:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Ideas on "Why Living Dangerous can be A Good Thing" in Ruby?

On 1/9/06, Todd <toddkennethbenson@yahoo.com> wrote:

> I mean, here you have a black box that a few moments from now may not
> be a black box anymore!  It may turn green...  It may pop out at you
> like those fond memories of the jack-in-the-box.  You look at it, prod
> it, it isn't reliable (you posit), it doesn't come up like the sun in
> the morning every day, and start to feel there's some deep and dark
> sinister purpose waiting to be unleashed.  This program, this thing,
> suddenly feels like almost sort of a Pandora's box.  In that moment of
> inspiration, you quickly walk away feeling better about yourself for
> suggesting another, more 'stable', language that you can use.  The CIO
> will be proud :)
>
> At least, that was my first impression.  That, until I started seeing
> how impressive not only the coding practices were, but also the
> incredible knowledge base in the Ruby community.  Not to mention how
> it has made my life a bit easier.

I'd like to quote this snippet as the beginning of my article, is that okay?

This brings up an interesting point though.  In Ruby, idioms are more
than just 'good practice'.  They really do matter, because they are
our biggest sense of 'security'.  This of course leaves the
responsibilities in the hands of the coders, but from my experience,
the majority of the well known applications adhere to good style, and
their developers are consistant at being idiomatic in their
application design.  The same can not necessarily be said for the
majority in other languages.