From: Paul Lutus <nospam@...>
Date: 2006-10-27T06:00:28+09:00
Subject: Re: What's the difference between send and instance_eval?

michele wrote:

> One last question:
> 
> Is it the Ruby language that make programmers be good, or is it that
> good people are drawn too the Ruby language?

Yes to one, maybe to the other, results not sorted. :)

In all seriousness, computer languages have historically tended to reflect
the intentions of their creators, and creating easy-to-use languages has
rarely been on anyone's radar screen, compared to issues of job security,
making oneself look brilliant, and locking out the unwashed masses.

Doctors until recently excluded the masses by speaking Latin, geeks exclude
the masses by speaking a kind of technical shorthand, one in which there is
an obscure computer term or instruction for every imaginable real-world
contingency (techy-wife to techy-husband at bedtime: "So, are we online
tonight or what?"). It's sort of like being a teenager your entire life.

There just aren't many languages that approach Ruby for readability, for a
reasonable correspondence between how people think and what can be executed
by the interpreter:

read(file) unless(busy_sleeping)

And there are only a certain number of programmers constitutionally disposed
to allow their code be this readable and transparent. At its most basic, it
is the difference between:

"I can solve your problem."

-- and --

"You can solve your problem."

-- 
Paul Lutus
http://www.arachnoid.com