From: Florian Gilcher <flo@...>
Date: 2009-12-14T09:47:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Poll: Significant Indentation


On Dec 13, 2009, at 8:49 PM, David Masover wrote:

> On Sunday 13 December 2009 06:02:23 pm Florian Gilcher wrote:
>> Okay, flame on ;)!
>
> Well, if you want...

It was more meant as a joke. Remember: pack irony tags next time ;).

>
>> Never, such a feature should not be optional.
>
> If you mean you hate it so much you don't want to see it, fine.
>
> If you mean you'd like to see it go one way or another, that's  
> interesting.
> Parentheses are often optional in Ruby. I think options are good --  
> coding
> conventions should be enforced by the project, not the language.

Yes, and it is one of the issues where there are often collisions while
defining coding standards. The problem is that I believe there should  
not
be a too big visual delta between two options.

While options are good (I do have my fair share of strange patterns I  
love
to use as well), you can also over-cramp the language with options. As  
I wrote,
I would love to see literal Ruby and actually thought about  
implementing it.
But on such a scale, that would mean two and a half things:

1. your project is not accepted and a lot of unnecessary work
2a. your idea is accepted into core
2b. you introduce a hard community split - those who install you  
library and
those who don't.

Literate Haskell for example only works because GHC understands it.

>>> Have you done any significant development in Python?
>>> (yes/no)
>>
>> What's significant?
>
> Mostly looking for self-assessment here. The fact that you can  
> identify
> something else you'd want to take from python suggests you've at  
> least used
> it. Contrast to Seebs, who "couldn't get past the horror" -- not  
> that it's an
> invalid opinion, but I'd much rather hear from people who are  
> comfortable in
> both.

It's not like I am opposed to Python. Most of the time, I just don't  
see a reason
to do a lot of work in it, being very proficient in Ruby. They kind of  
solve the
same problem. I am in great pain for not being able to visit the RuPy  
the last
two years.

I do have some fun with pypy from time to time and would never think of
reimplementing that in Ruby, just because it is written in Python.

> For example, I can't get past the horror of PHP or Visual Basic, so  
> my opinion
> isn't as valuable as that of someone who has done significant  
> development in
> PHP and lived to tell about it.

I also did significant work with PHP. PHP 5.3 is... somehow okay as a  
language.
The core library is still horrible. And thats kind of my point: I use  
Ruby because
I like the way the core and std lib is built. Not because there is an  
end-thingy
at the end of my blocks or not. Matz's EuRuKo2009-talk had a nice stab  
at the
"API defines the language" thing.

I know quite a share of languages that a lot of people find horribly  
ugly. Haskell,
Prolog and Erlang mostly. I don't mind their syntax that much, because  
I am more
interested in the runtime system they use. I write Ruby because it  
allows some
pretty descriptive concepts and is a good in-between between all those  
languages.
Sure, the end-wall at the end of nested class definition can be ugly  
from time
to time, but it by far does not make irritate me enough to want a  
whole alternative
parser for it.