From: Conrad Schneiker <schneiker@...>
Date: 2000-07-13T22:51:37-05:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:04001] Re: Principle of least effort -- another Ruby virtue.

Hi,

"Dave Thomas" wrote:
> Conrad Schneiker <schneik@austin.ibm.com> writes:
>
> > > Or at least, couldn't it be confused as one. And if it could, then I'm
not sure
> > > I'd like to see Ruby sharing it.
> >
> > Well, some people call Perl a {great, powerful, innovative, flexible,
productive,
> > etc.} programming language, so I guess to avoid confusion we shouldn't
call Ruby a
> > {great, powerful, innovative, flexible, productive, etc.} programming
language
> > either, should we? :-)
>
> My point was that if languages have catchphrases associated with
> them, then Perl has TMTOWTDI and "Laziness, Impatience,and Hubris".
>
> And people might confuse "Principle of Least Effort" with Laziness.

Oh.

Well, maybe we shouldn't worry about trying to convert _everyone_. Maybe we
should concentrate on the top (say) 90% of the potential market, and not
worry about the hopeless 10% who give common sense a bad name.

There may be something to be said for passing over the tiny fraction of lost
souls who would dismiss Ruby because they would equivocate the principle of
least effort with abject laziness without realizing that the sense of
laziness that Larry Wall and his Perl supporters intended was the sense of
"working smarter, not harder". (On the other hand, maybe this is what killed
off Lisp/CLOS/etc. as mainstream languages--after all, who in this high
performance era want a language that does lazy evaluation! :-)

Conrad