From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2006-12-05T10:12:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Question about Ruby philosophy

On Dec 4, 2006, at 6:42 PM, Edwin Fine wrote:

> 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 <shudder>. That could be  
> fun to
> debug.

Perl has had the same issue for a long time now and it probably was  
used by "every second programmer" in its prime.  It works when people  
stay conscious of what they are doing and remember to document.   
Other times it degrades into an unusable mess and we hope natural  
selection will kill off those libraries.

I'm with Ruby's natural tendency on this issue:  trust the programmer.

James Edward Gray II