From: Lloyd Zusman Date: 2006-10-17T03:15:13+09:00 Subject: Re: What is the reason for this syntax? "Kevin Olemoh" writes: > Who said you had to force anything? Why do you assume that in all > cases having multiple dialects is beneficial whether we are talking > about operating systems or things we use to communicate with people. > Its a flase assumption in reality, there are languages that exist that > do not have a concept of "past" like there is in eg Romance languages > so it becomes almost impossible to try to express the concept in that > language. > > If you have ten tribes in a given area that all speak different > languages it will be pretty hard to do business if you do not have at > least one language that is commonly spoken between a majority of the > groups involved at the very least. This of course does not mean that a > state must only have one official language (Some areas of China have > more than one official language other than the standardized one.) > > Back to computers: > > The situation with binary formats is just plain ridiculous and there > is no way to justify a spat between maintainers creating a situation > where repositories for the same distribution (dialect) are > incompatible with each other! (Fedora had this problem for quite some > time.) Had there already been a standard binary type for Linux as a > whole the problem would have never gotten as bad as it did with Fedora > or has with Linux in general. Its fine to have a bazillion binary > formats for all I care however Linux as a community should have one > that will just work more often than not on any Linux system. Without > such a thing the diversity serves to create a weakness in the > useability of these systems as opposed to a strength. Well, in general, I agree that it would be beneficial if some sort of common language that would let other computer languages interoperate, in a manner that's analogous to how nearby tribes need to have some kind of lingua franca in which to communicate and do business. XML is one attempt to create a usable, language-independed data format. So is yaml. And there are others. But these are not higher-level languages, for which I'm not sure that it makes sense to have some sort of universal, interoperable syntax. But even if such a higher-level lingua franca were to be desirable, ruby will not end up being such a thing, nor will perl nor python nor any other languages that have been widely used for 10-20 years. Each one of these has evolved its own conventions, and each one has a huge code base of existing software (probably millions of lines) which would break if one of them were to be altered in order to make it more lingua-franca-like. As much as you might be able to make compelling arguments (based on either rhetoric or reason) for why ruby might be better if certain syntax changes were put in place, in real life, it will be very unlikely that such changes will be implemented, given the amount of pre-existing code that might break if changes are being put into place. The ruby 2.0 effort might still be open to certain changes, however, as long as they are acceptable to Matz. I believe you would be better off starting a project to create a new language which has the common, lingua-franca-like characteristics that you are talking about here. Or perhaps there are already projects that you can join whose purposes are to build such a language. > On 10/16/06, Martin Coxall wrote: >> > My point is: diversity of language leads to diversity of culture and >> > diversity of thought. >> > >> >> Absolutely. Good programmers should ensure where possible that they >> are coding regularly in at least two languages, and should take the >> effort to learn many more. >> >> But remember, a language that doesn't allow you to think about >> programming in a new way isn't worth knowing... >> >> Martin >> >> > > -- Lloyd Zusman ljz@asfast.com God bless you.