From: "David A. Black" Date: 2009-02-01T20:54:07+09:00 Subject: Re: Its a Free Language Hi -- On Sun, 1 Feb 2009, Sean O'Halpin wrote: > On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 11:00 PM, Mike Stephens wrote: >> An attractive aspect of Ruby is how it is usually presented as agnostic >> - you can use it in an object oriented style or you can choose >> functional or procedural styles. So if you like to think in terms of >> procedures instead of objects you can still sit at the same tables as >> other Ruby programmers. Having said that, I would guess that any >> procedure can be re-represented in terms of objects and your thinking >> should move in that direction over time to align with the essence of the >> language. >> > > The power of Ruby does not come from its object-orientation alone - > how many times do we really use polymorphism or inheritance? Yet I bet > most of us use #select, #map, blocks and literal regular expressions > in almost every program we write. I certainly do. At the same time, though, I'd say that object orientation per se doesn't depend on polymorphism and inheritance. To me it's the convergence back onto the sending-msgs-to-objects paradigm that's at the heart of it (though I don't put that forth as a CS-ly correct characterization, just my sense of it). On the third hand... :-) there's that functional style of calling methods in Ruby, though it's also OO under the hood of course. David -- David A. Black / Ruby Power and Light, LLC Ruby/Rails consulting & training: http://www.rubypal.com Coming in 2009: The Well-Grounded Rubyist (http://manning.com/black2) http://www.wishsight.com => Independent, social wishlist management!