From: Avi Bryant <avi@...4.com>
Date: 2001-11-02T02:41:31+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24102] Re: where would you position Ruby in that plot? OO against Dynamic

On Fri, 2 Nov 2001, Armin Roehrl wrote:

> I came across the attached plot.
> x-axis: "Dynamic"
> y-axis: "Object-oriented"
> and then the authors classified several languages:
> From Smalltalk to Fortran.
> Where would you place Ruby?

I'd wedge it into the triangle between CLOS, Dylan, and Smalltalk - a
little less OO than smalltalk, a little more OO than CLOS, a
little less dynamic than CLOS and smalltalk.

Compared to Ruby:

- Smalltalk gets extra OO points for implementing all control structures
as message sends.
- Smalltalk gets extra dynamism points for being image based rather than
source based.

- CLOS loses some OO points for relying on the functional/procedural Lisp
substrate.
- CLOS gets extra dynamism points for the MOP.

- Dylan loses a number of dynamism points for lacking "eval" and having
limited reflection.
- Dylan should really be at the same level of OO as Ruby (everything's an
object, including classes, but not everything's a method call), and should
get bonus points somewhere for multimethods, but I can't help docking it
ever so slightly for using generic functions instead of message sends.

The other axis I'm interested in is ease of metaprogramming - here, the
ranking might be

Smalltalk < Ruby < Dylan < Common Lisp

Although Ruby and Dylan is a bit of a tossup (macros vs. eval).  Smalltalk
loses big here for its source code model (although it would win it back in
spades if we introduced a tool support axis...)

Cheers,
avi