From: pjb@... (Pascal J. Bourguignon) Date: 2009-07-31T17:50:05+09:00 Subject: Re: How Come Ruby is Text-Oriented? Mike Stephens writes: > I've just been re-reading Byte August 1981 - an edition dedicated to > Smalltalk-80. Often people say Ruby has roots in Smalltalk (amongst > other things) but the thing you notice is Smalltalk is visual ie it has > a graphical interface. How is it that 28 years later we work by typing > text into an editor? I've got also another answer. Perhaps you will find it more serrious, perhaps not: That's because alphabetic text is actually a GIANT PROGRESS, compared to pictural (parietal) or ideographic modes. It is not 28 years later that we're still in text, it's 4700 years later, and it has still all the advantages it had over hieroglyphs. Good students may learn 800 ideograms per year, but even bad students need only three months (with the alphabetical method) to learn to read all the words of their language (up to 1,000,000 words or more). There have been deleterious forces that want to fight literacy, they've been pushing global methods to learn reading alphabetical language and the only results are that in 2000+ 70% of the pupils can't read after 4 years of learning, while in 1900, 95% of them could read and write very well. The Graphical User Interfaces are promoted for the same reason. Notice that chimps can do even better than human on most tasks involving GUIs... -- __Pascal Bourguignon__