From: Mike Stephens <rubfor@...>
Date: 2011-04-12T21:31:34+09:00
Subject: Re: functional paradigm taking over

What we've seen here is some people - but not all - have a fixed frame
of reference about what qualifies as a language.

If you are religious the terms 'good' and 'evil' have a very clear and
self-evident meaning. If you are an atheist they seem to be two sets of
rather similar things that appear to be rather arbitrary. The Christian
Old Testament said 'evil' was marrying people from other ethnic groups,
whereas killing them and their animals was 'good'. The Christian New
Testament changed those set memberships a bit.

Ruby is a very powerful language that also has the merit of being able
to express complexity in an elegant way. However if you don't
particularly need all that power then you shouldn't write off languages
which do some things easily but become contorted when you try and
replicate complex Ruby capabilities.

'Domain Specific Language' is a perjorative term. It's just saying I
can't conveniently do certain things I'm used to doing in the way I
prefer. To say that matters, you need to show that typical domains
definitely require such capabilities. My point earlier was not that I
was a superior being (I don't know where that came from) but that from
my experience in the oil, banking, insurance, corflakes and fragances
business, most programming is using quite basic features. OK, that might
not extend to nuclear fission reactors, but let's keep a sense of
proportion here.

There certainly is an argument that functional languages are more easily
mapped to multi-core computers. If I buy one of those S-word platforms,
I get sophisticated parallel processing built in for free. For Ruby, I
would have to carefully program that as Ruby has no general purpose
model/vocabulary/semantics for conveying or deducing dependancies.

Or has it?

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.