From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2008-04-25T23:11:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Minimalism

aidy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have been reading a WikiPedia piece on Minimalist Computing (http://
> tinyurl.com/6h83b3). Could we argue that Ruby is a minimal language?
> 
> Regards
> 
> Aidy
> 
> 

I don't think Ruby is minimalist in any sense of the word. As far as I'm 
concerned, there are just two minimalist programming languages -- Scheme 
and Forth. I don't even think Common Lisp qualifies. APL and Smalltalk 
probably come closer than any others.

There are quite a few features you could take out of Ruby to make it 
more "minimalist". For openers, the syntactic freedom many people love 
about Ruby is a source of great complexity for any entity (human or 
program) that must parse it. Scheme and Forth don't suffer from this.