From: Giles Bowkett <gilesb@...>
Date: 2006-10-09T02:04:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. Rails

> I'm not in the general habit of feeding trolls, but in this case I think
> I'll make an exception. If you want to be treated with respect, please
> refrain from discussions of bestiality on a programming language forum.
> It's inappropriate, illegal in most places, and just in general not
> funny, if indeed that was your intent in claiming that you have
> advocated it.

I have certainly learnt this lesson.

> Maybe I'm old-fashioned, or just old, but I'm not at all convinced that
> "linguistic diversity", as you call it, or "too <expletive-deleted> many
> <expletive-deleted> programming languages", :) as I sometimes call it,
> is necessarily a "good thing". I personally find the constant switching
> of syntactic and semantic gears between my two main programming
> languages, Perl and R, jarring.
>
> Of course, I've been programming a long time, starting with macro
> assembler and FORTRAN in a time when Lisp and APL were "new kids on the
> block." People who *haven't* learned new programming languages,
> especially languages *semantically* orthogonal to ones that they are
> familiar with, should of course learn new ones. But if you want to get
> paid as a programmer, treat this as a way of making yourself a better
> programmer in the languages you get paid to work in, rather than as an
> "opportunity" to "proselytize" your newly-learned language, however
> wonderful that language might be. :)

Weirdly enough the only other place I've heard of R is the same place
this question comes from. Anyway -- I'm also wondering if this is such
a great thing, or just a sort of balkanization.

-- 
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org