From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2008-04-26T18:51:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Minimalism

On 26 Apr 2008, at 05:37, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Eleanor McHugh wrote:
>> 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 :)
>
> You can do that in C too -- write a Forth inner interpreter in C and  
> then code in Forth. :)

It scares me how many of the same rabbit holes we're explored...

> But seriously, despite its minimalism, once you understand the core  
> syntax and semantics of Scheme, it's fairly easy to read Scheme  
> code. A Scheme interpreter in C is, on the other hand, almost  
> indecipherable.

Minimalism is resolution-dependent, in that what looks minimal at one  
level of abstraction will generally look incredibly complex the moment  
you start exploring how those abstractions are composed. The advantage  
of very high level languages is that they usually ship with lots of  
useful abstractions, removing the need to build your own from scratch  
and thus broadening the extent to which an average programmer can  
casually achieve what in lower level languages might require a deep  
understanding of computer science and/or the underlying platform.

It's much like the way that your average media studies student can  
sound insightful because of the vocabulary they've learned, even  
though they'd be hard pressed to form those opinions on their own ;p

And that sort of brings us back to Forth, which has always recognised  
that non-specialists programming is about words and numbers rather  
than parse trees or closures or <insert favourite Lispism here>. Which  
isn't to say that the kind of conceptual minimalism that many favoured  
CS languages try to achieve is a bad thing, just that it's often  
difficult for the average programmer to apply those languages to real- 
world problems under real-world conditions.


Ellie

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