From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2006-08-09T02:45:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Language chatter

On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 12:53:49AM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> 
> But of course, the Rails folks rediscovered all of this -- the power 
> that comes from restricting some freedoms. Maybe the Python motto -- 
> "There's only one way to do it" is the right thing after all.

It's not restriction that does this for you -- it's well-designed
default abstractions.  With some languages and for some tasks, those
defaults must exist in your head, and with others they exist in the
toolset (the language interpreter, the framework, et cetera).  In either
case, they need not be restrictions, per se.  Restrictions are
inviolable defaults, and Python's inviolable defaults are reasonably
well-designed, but they're still limiting when one must do something
that is best accomplished in a manner incompatible with those defaults.

Perl has a "horn of plenty" approach to defaults, where you pick and
choose your default behavior set from an incredibly large menu of
discrete defaults to suit your personal taste and your problem domain.
This has its ups and downs: on the upside, you have more flexibility
when you must accomplish something not covered by the vision of the guys
that created the language's defaults and, on the downside, you have a
language so complex that you're almost guaranteed to end up using a
suboptimal set of chosen default abstractions for your task because you
don't know the entire language (Larry Wall has, himself, said he doesn't
know all of Perl).

Lisp, in my understanding, achieves greater flexibility than Perl by
making it absurdly easy to arbitrarily generate the defaults that best
suit the task at hand.  Ruby, meanwhile, is a great compromise between
all three of those approaches: there are default abstractions that are
clearly defined, and it encourages the programmer to use them for
solving problems, but it makes it possible to use a plethora of other
abstractions that are nondefault and still available to the programmer.
When that's not enough, it provides macros for building your own
defaults from "scratch" with notable ease.

Obviously, this is all oversimplified, and I'm hampered by varying
levels of familiarity with the various languages discussed when I
explain my take on them, but I'm pretty sure nobody knows everything
about all these languages so I'll just chalk it up to "the human
condition".

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"The measure on a man's real character is what he would do
if he knew he would never be found out." - Thomas McCauley