From: David Alan Black <dblack@...>
Date: 2001-11-13T10:20:33+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24968] Re: Linux Magazine article

Hello --

On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Dave Thomas wrote:

>
>
> Andy & I've been asked to write a feature article about Ruby for Linux
> Magazine (www.linux-mag.com).
>
> I want to make this an upbeat article, featuring Ruby's strengths, and
> not other language's weaknesses. So, a quick poll request: what
> features of Ruby do you think would most impress or excite someone who
> hasn't used the language yet? What small applications would whet
> people's appetites?

My favorite things (not very original list) include:

* Cleanness of code.  I love looking at a screen and thinking
there's nothing there, then realizing that a ton of stuff is
going on :-)

* Iterators.

* Dynamism and extensibility.  That "you can even eat the tablecloth"
feeling.

One thing that I'm very intrigued by, and that might be ripe for a
fresh presentation, is inheritance in Ruby.  We've often heard mixins
described as the thing Ruby does instead of multiple inheritance.  I
don't know if this article is the place for it, but it seems to me
maybe it's time to find a way to describe the whole Ruby way of
handling this in a completely positive manner.  (I don't just mean
positive in the sense of enthusiastic, but positive in the sense of
something actually there, rather than something which fills in for
something that's missing.)

I encountered YAOOOOP (Yet Another Overview Of Object-Oriented
Programming) recently (in the book "Using UML"), and was struck by the
description of inheritance as, not inherent to OO languages, but as
one possible way of implementing generalization.  Matz has described
inheritance in Ruby as primarily a shared implementation.  I don't
know, maybe there's some way to put these pieces together and turn the
tide away from looking at mixins as ersatz multiple inheritance, and,
instead, looking at the whole thing (inheritance which is called that
but is not exactly the same approach to generalization that other
languages' inheritance is, plus the existence of mixins) in a new way.

(And if that doesn't fit into your article, maybe I'll work on a white
paper :-)


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav