From: David Ishmael <dishmael@...>
Date: 2006-03-27T22:24:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Areal noob question

>> Thank you very much for your insight.  As far as language maturity goes,
>> Ruby is technically older than PHP if you count it's Japanese heritage.
>> I truly love PHP and I REALLY love Java.  
>
>Could you summarize what you love about PHP and Java?

I'm still learning Ruby (so don't flame me too hard here), but some of the
programming paradigms I've grown accustomed to such as inline scope
declarations and type hinting are missed (at least by me).

protected foo( SomeObject o ) { ... }

In that one line I can tell you that the method is protected and requires
SomeObject to be passed to it.  Versus Ruby's:

protected

def foo( o )
    ...
end

My issue here is that the 'protected' declaration might not occur anywhere
near the method which means I either have to scan up the class file looking
for that declaration or use reflection on the class.  This is one of those
"less is more" view points where its nicer to declare protected once and
anything after it assumes that scope, yet I find it obscure since it might
be distant from a method I'm interested in.  I'm also not sure what 'o' is
supposed to be.  Should that be a String, Fixnum, or maybe a custom Object
(I guess I could inspect the method code to help identify what 'o' is)?


-Dave