From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2008-04-25T23:37:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Minimalism

On 25 Apr 2008, at 15:11, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> 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.

But conversely it's possible to write powerful programs with a very  
minimalist feel using Ruby, so whilst the language isn't minimalist it  
allows the programmer to be economical in a way that many languages  
fail to do.

Of course sometimes it's possible to express things in so terse a  
manner that even a zen master would be hard pressed to decipher them :)


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason