From: Henning von Rosen <henning@...>
Date: 2001-11-29T22:24:58+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26890] Article on Program design

Why does  for example Ruby appeal to people in the way it does?

Well-known Lisp'er Paul Graham has an interesting article on language
design:

http://www.paulgraham.com/langdes.html

I also think it relates to the matz' idea of "Human Oriented Programming".

"""
Architects know that some kinds of design problems are more personal than
others. One of the cleanest, most abstract design problems is designing
bridges. There your job is largely a matter of spanning a given distance
with the least material. The other end of the spectrum is designing chairs.
Chair designers have to spend their time thinking about human butts.

Software varies in the same way. Designing algorithms for routing data
through a network is a nice, abstract problem, like designing bridges.
Whereas designing programming languages is like designing chairs: it's all
about dealing with human weaknesses.
"""

He also states that the rise of server-side software makes it much easyer
for new languages:

"""
...Server-based software blows away this whole model. With server-based
software you can use any language you want. Almost nobody understands this
yet (especially not managers and venture capitalists). A few hackers
understand it, and that's why we even hear about new, indy languages like
Perl and Python. We're not hearing about Perl and Python because people are
using them to write Windows apps.

What this means for us, as people interested in designing programming
languages, is that there is now potentially an actual audience for our work.
"""


/h