From: Kyle Schmitt Date: 2007-02-28T05:13:46+09:00 Subject: Re: Rant abouts IDE's On 2/27/07, Klaus Ramelow wrote: > In my opinion the Community is most helpful but, by the numbers of > questions resp > problems, to me it seems a tremendeous waste of time (and thoughts) because > this shows that (also) ruby lacks the clarity (not only) I am looking for. > There would be much less questions and therefore more productivity, > if there would be a clarity in this language - using human language > resp. mnemonic - > like using Basic or Cobol or Pascal or D (or even Assembler). > > Using Ruby (and Python ...) with its complicated coding, we don`t need > the power > of todays Computers because we do, by this kind of languages, > the precompiling in our heads instead of using the given hardware > (which is much faster in doing this - and every time in the same way / > straight forward - > not asking the number of questions - average about 150 per day - we do > in this forum!) > I think there is only ONE way: using the above mentioned languages in > precompilers > - for the pupose of transportability to different Sytems - generating > i.e. Java bytecode > (.class). There could be jBasic, jCobol etc. > > COMPUTER-LANGUAGES should not be treated as a religion but as a tool for > DOING SOME WORK FOR US. > We should not longue for a code consisting of the smallest number of > characters. > There should be very little questions about the language (how will it me > understand, > will it do what I want) but how can I implement the wanted logic using > human language > resp mnemonic so there will be a readable and simple maintainable code > (even from project independent poeple). > TRICKY code - in this way - must be named as DIRTY code! > There are too many symbols with special meaning. OK OK, I'll bite about the first parts.. Any language, human or computer, effects how you think about the problem at hand. I can't cite anything off the top of my head, and I'm at work so I can't exactly go looking it up ;) but there is research that shows that point. Programming languages, and human languages, all lack clarity when they are being abused, used by people who don't know them well (like those who are learning and often post basic questions on this list), and those who are in the habit of using them poorly. To those who know Perl, Ruby and even Lisp*, they make immediate sense, and are as clear as any diagram of psudocode on the white board. If you think in a language, you've found the legendary DWIM (Do What I Mean). And I'll bring up one more thing. What about the joy of learning the language? The joy of learning what makes things work? In real code, yes, the idea of writing the shortest possible program may be silly, but when learning, when exploring, it's important to do things like... Write a self replicating program; Try and make a basic xml validation method in 100 lines or less; Write Conway's game of life in as few calls as possible. Immediately useful? No. Ultimately makes someone a better programmer? Probably. Ultimately make someone a more fluent programmer in that language? Definitely. Heck when you teach people a foreign language you do the same thing. At some point you have to show them how to play with the sticky nasty bits of it, otherwise the learner never will gain the full understanding, the full polish of the language. Think of: the use of a and an in English; the use of the colons and semicolons I abuse so regularly; the tricks to make grammatically correct paragraph long sentences; the use of the apostrophe, which seems to elude the grasp of many native speakers now a days. --Kyle A. Schmitt * OK yes there are languages that make _no_ reasonable sense at all, BF unLambda and VB6 come to mind.