From: Phlip <phlipcpp@...>
Date: 2007-10-22T11:10:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Is Ruby For Me?

Tony De wrote:

>I did have another question because I think I understand Ruby to be
> fundamentally different in this way.  But perhaps I am wrong.  I am
> accustomed to Event Driven programming with Delphi.  Unlike the early
> days of Start at the top and end at the bottom or somewhere in the
> middle.  How does one envision program flow with Ruby?

Event Driven is a "style" of programming. Delphi and Ruby both support a 
more fundamental concept - a "paradigm" of programming. Both Object Pascal 
and Ruby are "Object Oriented" languages; they permit you to easily declare 
objects, with data and methods, and to architect a program by arranging 
these objects together into object models.

When a program decouples its input events from their effects, this is "event 
driven". An event enters a program and routes to a terminal method. This 
changes the object model in memory, somehow. The next event meets the object 
model in its new state - not its old one.

You are describing the "procedural" style, where the program's state depends 
on the location of the program's control flow point, in a long method. These 
are styles, not paradigms. But Event Driven is much closer to OO than to 
procedural, and both Delphi and Ruby should be used with short methods, lots 
of objects, and a deep object model.

-- 
  Phlip