From: Edwin Fine Date: 2006-12-05T09:42:00+09:00 Subject: Re: Question about Ruby philosophy The bottom line seems to be that the current crop of Ruby programmers are responsible enough not to mess with things under the hood unless they understand the workings. Is this an accurate assessment? What scares me a bit is when Ruby becomes extremely popular and every second programmer is using it, and less-disciplined developers start providing libraries that tinker with core classes willy-nilly. At some point you are going to get clashes between two same-named add-on methods in (say) Array, that do different things . That could be fun to debug. Sure, you can decide not to use such a library, but you have to get burned first before you realize it's not good to use. I'm probably showing my age here, but I remember cases where people used to code macros in C header files (like MIN and MAX) that would clash with other uses of MIN and MAX and cause untold havoc. Some of these were from mainstream companies. It's one thing to say "What if I'm stupid?". It's quite another thing to say, "What if lots of stupid/undisciplined people start using Ruby?" This tends to be the price of language popularity, I fear. Probably, evolutionary forces will get rid of the poorly designed libraries in time. I'm more worried about the beleaguered corporate IT developer who often does not have much choice and has to use in-house code. I dunno. Thoughts? -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.