From: Armin Roehrl <armin@...>
Date: 2001-12-26T18:32:54+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:29438] Convincing people that Ruby is more productive than C++ or Java in many cases

Hi all,

	X-mas is holiday season, so one meets tons of friends
to discuss the latest toys. Ruby is one of the nicest ones :-).

I had a long discussion with some die-hard Java and C++ guys
trying to get the message across that they should at 
least give Ruby a try as it might boost their productivity. I defined
productivity simply by getting the job done. By job I refer to any code
from trivial, to prototyping, to full-sized production code.

My main selling point for Ruby/Smalltalk/Squeak.. versus Java and C++
is late binding. The later the binding happens, the more freedom
the programmer has and the faster it is to change/refactor the 
program later. There is a famous foreword by Alan Kay in a Squeak
book defending that argument.
--
http://guzdial.cc.gatech.edu/squeakbook/AlansForeword.html
"I believe that the secret weapon that can be
used to make progress here is extreme late binding. Of what? Of as many 
things in our development system as possible. One can make a good
argument that most of the advances in both hardware and software design have 
been facilitated by introducing new latebinding mechanisms.
Going way back in hardware, we can think of index and relocation registers, 
memory management units, etc. In software, we went from absolute
instruction locations and formats, to symbolic assemblers, to subroutines, to 
relocatable code, to hardware independent data structure formats,
to garbage collection, to the many late binding advantages of objects, 
including classes and instances, message sending, encapsulation,
polymorphism, and metaprogramming. " 

--

What are your selling points?
Enjoy the holidays & happy rubying in 2002,
Armin.

-----------------------------------------------
Armin Roehrl, http://www.approximity.com