From: Conrad Schneiker <schneiker@...>
Date: 2000-03-25T18:29:43-06:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:02169] Re: Scripting and OO -- thought question

From: <h.fulton@att.net>

> In his words, "If I were going to write a 60,000
> line chess program or something, I wouldn't do it
> in Perl or any other script; I'd use Java or C++
> or something. And if I were doing something like
> a filter, like 'munging' a text file, I wouldn't
> really need OO."

> I think I see his point; but perhaps one reason he
> would not use a scripting language for a large
> project is that he simply has never SEEN a scripting
> language powerful enough for large projects.

... And other thing....

One of the reasons that many people use Java and Perl is not so much for
writing giant programs as for the fact that many giant programs have in
great part (in effect) _already_ been written in Java and Perl for them.
These things are of course the extensive set of standard and optional
extension libraries. It is Java and Perl's OO features (as troublesome as
they are for novices) that made this mountainous infrastructure tolerably
easy for experts to implement--but much more importantly--make it very easy
to for users to exploit. This is one reason why you really want an OO
language for even many fairly simple tasks. The great majority of Perl
programmers never use OO directly, but almost all Perl4 programmers switched
to Perl5 (among other reasons) in order to _indirectly_ take advantage of
Perl5's OO features (and of course users that started out with Perl5 also do
the same thing). Moreover, by using an OO language for simple stuff, you
don't have to change languages for more sophisticated tasks, which relates
to other points that others have previously made.

This spurious and counterproductive scripting issue is another reason that I
think it is exceedingly foolish to characterize languages in terms of their
implementation. Since people just seem to have to have some superfluous
adjectives to stereotypically pigeonhole programming languages, then I think
it is much more appropriate to call languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby
"very high level languages" (with Ruby being the highest level language in
the series).

Please pardon my end of the week humor (pun intended)....

OK Ruby marketeers, let's hear you all say in unison,
"Ruby is a very high level language."
What did you say?
"Ruby is a very high level language".
What's that again?
"Ruby is a very high level language."
Once more more with feeling!
"RUBY IS A VERY HIGH LEVEL LANGUAGE."
Once more like you really mean it!
"RUBY  IS  A  VERY  HIGH  LEVEL  LANGUAGE ! ! ! !"
Great! You got it!
8-)

Conrad