Re: functional paradigm taking over

Chad Perrin wrote:
>> Denigrating another person's choice of tools will certainly not make
>> that person likely to seek your advice again, nor consider you helpful.
>>      
> I don't think anyone is denigrating the use of spreadsheets for problems
> best solved by spreadsheets.  People just object to describing MS Excel
> as a better programming language than Ruby -- a pretty tall order, given
> it is woefully inadequate to many tasks for which programming is done,
> and is not in fact a "language" by any definition short of the sort of
> mental gymnastics necessary to discuss 4GLs with a straight face.
>    
*Somebody earlier suggested listening to Robert Martin's address to the 
RailsConf, and I did. It speaks to what can destroy a language, and it 
pretty much delineates the types of attitudes that are being brought 
forward here. Excel is being denigrated here, and that is foolish. Many 
people use spreadsheets all day long to accomplish their work. They are 
good with spreadsheets and comfortable with them. What is being said 
here is that they should throw away all that goodness and go to Ruby or 
something like Ruby, because it is better for some classes of problems. 
That's a little like taking a jackhammer out to get rid of the spots on 
your garage floor. Since most of these people will never need to program 
something that they cannot do in Excel, even if awkwardly, that seems 
foolish. Because of their familiarity with the tool they use most often, 
they can accomplish more with it in an hour than they could in days 
working with Ruby. No matter what tools you use to work with Ruby, it is 
a complete paradigm shift, and that is difficult for the average person 
who does not consider themselves a professional programmer. It may have 
taken them years to learn how to do what they now do in Excel, and Excel 
is only a stalking horse for a wider point here.

If your current tools, whatever they may be, are slowing or blocking you 
sufficiently that you must go to a new tool, or if you need an excellent 
tool for future work, something like Ruby makes all the sense in the 
world, but every advocate of something like Ruby should realize that 
Ruby is not an endpoint. In the fairly near future, we are going to 
progress to machines that never turn off and never reboot, and that do 
not distinguish applications. Ruby nor any other current language is 
equipped to deal with that type of environment. Things like genetic 
programming and fuzzy logic and really, machines that "think" like we do 
are the goal. Now I realize that eyes are rolling and so forth, but what 
I am trying to say is that Ruby is not nor will it be in that world, and 
that future is coming far faster than most imagine. If you get your nose 
so stuck down to the grindstone that all you can see is Ruby, then you 
will eventually suffer the same criticism as is being thrown at the guy 
who is using Excel at the moment. Working like the devil to make Ruby 
better, and to make it more accessible, are worthy expenditures of 
energy. Being offensively defensive about it and parsing definitions 
about what is and is not a programming language are complete wastes of 
time, and are self defeating.

At the moment, Ruby is not threatening to displace even COBOL and 
ForTran, much less C/C++ and Assembler, and there are hosts of simple 
tasks that really should not be done in Ruby or anything but a 4GL, you 
know, that target of a derisive earlier comment. I used one of the very 
first 4GL's, Easytrieve, and it allowed me to do in 15 minutes, what 
COBOL programmers were taking weeks or months to accomplish (note that I 
did not say good COBOL programmers). For reasonably complex data changes 
or for reports, it was literally an order of magnitude or two better 
than COBOL, and there are days that I would give my right arm to still 
have it. It is commercial and costs more than I can afford for my 
purposes. In the mean time, I really don't want to write reports in 
Ruby, though I realize that it is quite possible, and simple data fixes 
in Ruby, especially on new files for which I don't have schemas, aren't.

Everett L.(Rett) Williams II
** *