From: Nate Morse <morse.nate@...>
Date: 2006-05-27T02:07:37+09:00
Subject: Re: ANN: InfoQ Ruby Community "unlaunched"

>Or one might think of it as: no violin/bagpipe equivalent of a cat
>walking across a piano keyboard.
Hee he
My cat just walked across the keyboard and voi-la' a Ruby program

On 5/26/06, dblack@wobblini.net <dblack@wobblini.net> wrote:
> Hi --
>
> On Fri, 26 May 2006, James Britt wrote:
>
> > I happened to skim though  the David A. Black article, and this caught my
> > eye:
> >
> > "Violinist Itzhak Perlman has described the difference between the violin and
> > the piano in these terms - not that one is easy and the other difficult, over
> > the long haul, but specifically that the piano, unlike the violin, gets out
> > of your way. Says Perlman:
> >
> > Violinists have a harder time to make pure music than pianists, because
> > pianists ... are immediately forced to turn the phrase. They don't have to
> > deal with vibrato, they don't have to deal with shifting, they don't have to
> > deal with sliding, they don't have to deal with bow-speed .... [On the
> > piano,] basically you put down the key and you get a sound.... You have to
> > deal with music immediately."
> >
> > Of course, I'm no Perlman, but I still found his opinion peculiar.
> >
> > I've played some piano, and played some violin, and much prefer the violin
> > because, to me, it gets out the way far more than does a piano.
> >
> > Plus violins are lighter;  carrying a piano around gets tiresome.
> >
> > Hence, violins are more agile.
>
> I play the cello, which is almost the worst (other than double bass)
> from the lugging around point of view: too big to be convenient, too
> small to entitle you to expect one to be already installed, like a
> piano or organ, where you have to play.
>
> > "In this light, the piano emerges as the Ruby or Rails of the musical
> > instrument kingdom."
> >
> > I tend to think of Ruby as the Stratocaster of programming languages.
>
> Whoops, that should be "...as the Ruby on [not or] Rails of the..."
> (Obie, if you're reading this, please fix :-)
>
> Certainly for someone who has learned to play the violin, the violin
> can be as transparent as the piano.  I think Perlman is talking about
> the sort of baseline conditions.  It's the same with bagpipes, at
> least from what I understand: there's no bagpipe equivalent of just
> sitting down and pressing a piano key.
>
> Or one might think of it as: no violin/bagpipe equivalent of a cat
> walking across a piano keyboard.
>
>
> David
>
> --
> David A. Black (dblack@wobblini.net)
> * Ruby Power and Light, LLC (http://www.rubypowerandlight.com)
>    > Ruby and Rails consultancy and training
> * Author of "Ruby for Rails" from Manning Publications!
>    > http://www.manning.com/black
>
>