From: "David A. Black" Date: 2008-04-25T23:44:03+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby Minimalism Hi -- On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Eleanor McHugh wrote: > 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 :) True, but one of the things I love about Ruby is that, for the most part, as the code gets smaller, it actually becomes clearer. Of course in golfing contests and such it takes on that line-noisish quality that makes it hard to decipher. David -- Rails training from David A. Black and Ruby Power and Light: INTRO TO RAILS June 9-12 Berlin ADVANCING WITH RAILS June 16-19 Berlin INTRO TO RAILS June 24-27 London (Skills Matter) See http://www.rubypal.com for details and updates!