From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2009-02-27T00:04:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Nexus Programming Language

Eleanor McHugh wrote:
> There seems to be a fairly clean divide between the folks who like 
> language for being language, and those who like language for the 
> specific things it can do.

I would say, these aren't completely unrelated -- the grammar and 
structure of a language, the way in which it lends itself to 
communication, or to poetry, is one of the things a language can do.

And yet, part of the beauty of a language can be revealed in what it can 
actually do. For example, I consider this to be beautiful:

get '/' do
  'Hello, world!'
end

But while I'm sure someone can demonstrate far more elegant examples of 
Sinatra code, and of code that Sinatra does better than other 
frameworks, it might be difficult to show the full extent of its beauty 
without the context that this is an http service, matching a request to 
an intended response.

That was a bit of a 'duh' moment for me. I was still relatively new to 
Rails and REST, but it was both aesthetically pleasing and immediately 
obvious what it does -- it was as if a full web stack hit my brain in an 
instant.

I would say, dissolving beauty into separate ideas of form and function, 
and then appreciating one without the other, is a bit like falling in 
love with a photograph, never having met the person behind it. I am not 
saying photographs cannot be beautiful, but if that is all you see in a 
person, you are missing a lot.

> We abandon the quest for beauty at our peril as it is the keenest 
> guide to correctness that we possess. Unfortunately an age of 
> aesthetic relativism has given it a bum wrap by attributing its 
> quality to things which patently aren't beautiful and are far from 
> correct.

The most blatant reminder of this that I've seen was in this presentation:

http://rubyhoedown2007.confreaks.com/session09.html

I won't spoil it, though -- anyone who hasn't seen this, just find an 
hour and watch it for yourself.