From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2008-11-02T21:03:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for Philosophers

On 02.11.2008 04:10, Sebastian Torena wrote:
> One Philosopher's great ambition may be to create almost one new.concept
> during his or her life, almost one concisely written idea, in whatever
> language. At certain point, doesn't really matter what language. Anyway
> almost everybody knows that Philosophy's History Most-Most Greatest Hits
> were written in Greek, Latin or German. I still don't know well why but,
> maybe, think, that could be related to some language's kind of
> flexibility that favors the creation -to get together in a mind- of
> major concepts.

I for myself think the reasons for your observation are historic rather 
than linguistic.  The fact that we know these writings has to do with a 
lot of lucky coincidences and the fact that Greek philosophy became 
fashionable in different periods of European history.  Btw, I believe 
you forgot to mention a few other languages, namely Hindi, Chinese and 
probably others which were also used to write important philosophical texts.

> So, what all this got to do with Ruby? Well, I've been thinking about to
> learn a second language from scratch. It could be Ruby.

You should be very clear about the fact that a programming language is 
very different from a natural language.  I am not sure whether 
programming languages are suited to write philosophical texts although 
they can help in reasoning about and solving of a certain class of 
problems (usually in the area of logic).

> And I say could
> cause I can't find one document that shows me the foundation.

The Pickaxe could be a good start, you can find it here 
http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/ although I'd recommend buying 
the second edition.  There are also numerous tutorials e.g. "Learning to 
Program" which you can find from http://ruby-doc.org/ .

> Is it possible to think about learning Ruby as to learn, for
> example, chess?

Do you want to think about learning Ruby or do you want to learn Ruby?

> If that's true, which are the most basics rules for
> playing Ruby?

I'd say they are the same for all procedural programming languages (on a 
certain level at least): you have state and you have instructions that 
operate on this state transforming it into another state (-> Turing 
Machine).

> I'm a philosopher, I got to think all the stuff by myself, so I'm not
> very interested on what programmers are doing with the latest classes or
> objects created by them. Just the basic rules; to comprehend and then
> start thinking -or playing-.

I am not sure whether it is a good idea to ignore the purpose of a tool 
when trying to understand how to use it.  Good luck!

Kind regards

	robert