From: David Rush <kumoyuki@...>
Date: 2007-06-27T17:20:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Probably an FAQ, but...

On Jun 27, 3:39 am, Morton Goldberg <m_goldb...@ameritech.net> wrote:
> On Jun 26, 2007, at 10:05 PM, James Britt wrote:
>
> > Morton Goldberg wrote:
> >> There are those who want to be language lawyers and those who
> >> enjoy using powerful and elegant tools to get computers to do
> >> interesting things[*]. Which are you?
>
> > Please; that's a false choice and needlessly insulting to Mr. Rush.
>
> I allowed that one could be both, but not both and a happy Ruby
> coder.

Who said happiness had any part of it? Certainly your footnote did
not. You referred to 'dedicated' Ruby coders, actually - I was unaware
I was signing up to the new religion. I would also suggest that I am
one of those people who *does* lie in the intersection of the set of
language lawyers and hard-core hackers (if you will pardon my
assertion of semantic equivalence) - as my long-ish career in
programming on a wide variety of platform shows.

> I was miffed by his attitude.

Sorry for saying that the Emperor has a hole in his trousers, but I
really didn't say he was naked - because he is not. However, formal
specifications *are* hugely useful, assuming that you have learned how
to think rigorously enough to make use of them. And as the history of
some programming languages has shown, need not be a barrier to
innovation even within the language specified.

*cue the old geezer tape* ... on second thought let's not

My attitude is what I said it was. I'm having a fair bit of fun
programming in Ruby - enough that I'm actively thinking about ways to
implement a native-code compiler - but the way that the language is
specified is a problem to me from many angles. And the process of
discovering that specification by trial and error brings back to mind
the worst of the bad old days of cross-assembly development and hand-
patching device drivers use hex editors.

whoopsie ... I did the old geezer thing anyway

> but I agree that I should not have gone
> ad hominem on him. My apologies to David Rush.

By all means, feel free to go ad hominem all you want - there's a long
and glorious Usenet tradition there. Many of us have felt deprived
since the departure of Erik Naggum from comp.lang.lisp, but the one
constant in the world is change...and crabby[1] hackers :)

david rush
http://cyber-rush.org/drr <- a very messy construction^Wwebsite
--
[1] and 'crabby' apparently is a term derived from Falconry, arguably
one of the oldest hacker careers