From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2002-03-14T03:20:18+09:00
Subject: Ruby mention in April 2002 DDJ

The article is entitled: Java's new Considered Harmful
It talks about the problems associated with using Java's 'new' keyword:

"But there are two problems with new:

*It allocates memory from the heap. 
*It is not polymorphic. 
"

http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=7027/ddj0204a/0204a.htm

Toward the end of the article:

"Ruby (see Programming In Ruby, by David 
Thomas and Andy Hunt, DDJ, January 2001) is able to fix this problem 
because it lets a method be "variadic" - to take any number of arguments. 
In Ruby, new does call initialize, passing along all its arguments. But 
both Smalltalk and Ruby are dynamically typed. It doesn't seem possible to 
have a general mechanism for polymorphic creation and initialization that 
is statically typed, because polymorphism requires that the creation 
method have the same argument types, but each class has its own 
requirements for initialization."

(another data point on the statically typed vs dynamically typed language 
comparison as well)

Phil