From: Caleb Clausen <vikkous@...>
Date: 2008-11-03T23:46:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for Philosophers

Just some of my thoughts here, not necessarily interesting or even original.

On 11/1/08, Sebastian Torena <citizenkant@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

As Robert pointed out, it may be very difficult to write an expository
text in ruby. Programming languages and natural languages aren't used
for (quite) the same thing. Most statements in ruby are imperative,
whereas in natural languages, mostly declarative statements are used.
So does this mean that you should be trying to learn prolog or SQL
instead? I don't know the answer to that.

> 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. And I say could
> cause I can't find one document that shows me the foundation. If I not
> wrong, in Ruby, everything belongs to one class or another. Then, the
> class Class itself must inherit certain characteristics from something

The interesting thing about Class is that it is an instance of itself.
Object and Module are the only other cases of this, as far as I know.

There's definitely a link between category theory (is that the right
name?) in philosophy and the design of object systems in computer
science. You should check out Francis Hwang's talk at last year's
rubyconf. It's on video:
http://rubyconf2007.confreaks.com/d2t1p7_conversations_vs_laws.html

> 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-.

The best tool for learning and playing with ruby is irb.... it's the
ruby program that overall has given me the most joy. If you're going
to learn by playing in irb, I recommend learning about some of ruby's
introspection features... things like Class#instance_methods.

The pickaxe has a writeup on irb:
http://www.rubycentral.com/pickaxe/trouble.html
#scroll down to the second section.

and introspection:
http://www.rubycentral.com/pickaxe/ospace.html