From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2007-03-15T07:51:53+09:00
Subject: Re: IDEA: Ruby "offline" CD / DVD

On 14 Mar 2007, at 17:04, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> 1. What sort of explosions of creativity were there in the 1980s? I  
> spent almost precisely that decade at Floating Point Systems, using  
> FORTRAN and FPS microcode to do hard-core number crunching. The  
> explosions of creativity I'm familiar with have to do with vector  
> and parallel architectures and just the beginning hints of things  
> like RISC and super-scalar. Back then, I couldn't have predicted  
> that the Xeon and AMD64 and hypervisors would dominate the  
> landscape. They told me I'd have a Cray on my desktop, but I  
> certainly didn't anticipate that it would also do email and word  
> processing, or that I'd be able to talk to colleagues all over the  
> world for free on it.

Funny, as a teenage hacker the world didn't look at all like that -  
not that I'd have said no to a desktop Cray!
I had to make do with a succession of z80-based micros and spent  
pretty much every waking hour (yay for insomnia!!!) writing adventure  
games and language interpreters in Basic. Lots of my friends were  
into the demo scene and did amazing stuff with graphics and sound and  
we used to get together at weekends to drink rot-gut cider and geek ;p

> 2. What's disruptive about Ruby? It seems to me perfectly  
> mainstream -- imperative, object oriented, dynamic, reasonable  
> block-structured syntax, agile, pragmatic, human-centric, etc.  
> Disruptive would be Scheme, FORTH, Haskell or Erlang.

Been there, done that. Well, FORTH and Scheme anyway. Haskell left me  
totally cold when I learnt it, and I've yet to play with Erlang. I  
wouldn't class any of them as disruptive as say Snobol or Icon were -  
not that most people here will have used either in anger. Yes they're  
different, and if you grok CS theory and like Lisp then Scheme is  
cool, but to be truly disruptive a language has to have broader  
appeal than that: it needs to be useable by people who don't get CS  
at all. Icon still has a following in the humanities which isn't a  
claim most languages can make.

To my mind Ruby fits the bill because it appears so perfectly  
mainstream (assuming that mainstream no longer means Java) and is  
lightweight enough not to get in the way. The syntax is expressive,  
but as easy to grasp as Basic so even a relative newbie can get into  
it - and once mastered it's just a joy to work with. What wonderful  
things I could have done twenty years ago if I'd had it to play with :)


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason