From: bbense+comp.lang.ruby.Aug.23.02@... Date: 2002-08-24T00:38:42+09:00 Subject: Re: A Repeat: New Language After Ruby? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In article , William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote: >Very well said, Charles. I completely agree with you. > >That's why I really hesitate to start learning Haskell. It seems Haskell >can only be interfaced with C through some intermediary called "Greed >Card" and not directly as between C and Ruby. Also one of my colleages >here is learning Scheme. I still cannot persuade myself to learn Haskell >in particular (why not Scheme, or even Emacs Lisp, which will make my >editor do all the wonderful things?) or a functional language in general. > >Regards, > >Bill >======================================================================== >Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote: >> (deleted) > >> I used to be where you are, but now I generally have to feel like a >> language will help me get work done before I can spend time on it. > - - Well, two years ago I would have been right with you. Why spend time on learning something new, I'll pick it up fast enough if I need to. I was very bored and disatisfied at work. Something was definitely wrong. I started looking back at how I got sucked into this whole computer thing and I realized that it was because I liked learning new things. In the job world it's easy to get in a rut, after all once you've climbed the learning curve a few times you rarely get that much out of repeating the process. - - However, I thought about it a lot and I resolved that I would spend at least one afternoon a week on "playing", i.e. exploring new tools and languages regardless of whether they would be useful or not. I eventually poked around with Ruby and from there got lead to the book "The Pragmatic Programmer". That book definitely put me in touch with why I drifted into computers to begin with. The first few chapters are actually kind of depressing, it's a sad commentary on the computer industry that people actually have to be told to do some of the very basics, but I found the rest of the book to be very inspirational. It reminded me of how I should be doing things, "Quality is Important". I also reread "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance" at about the same time. It really drove home the point to me that I would never be satisfied with computers until I could feel that I was doing quality work and not just "yet another awful hack". - - IMHO, if you program for a living and your job doesn't allow you the time and space to try things "just for the heck of it". It's time to get a new job. Working with computers can easily turn into depressing grunt work even with a 6 figure salary. - - I think learning a functional language is a useful thing to do, at least read some of the original papers. I actually get a lot more out of reading the design papers than twiddling the bits, but you have to do enough bit twiddling to really get the papers. I came to the realization that Ruby is many ways a functional language. - - Lastly, read "The Pragmatic Programmer" if you haven't and try and stick with it to the later chapters. - - Booker C. Bense -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBPWZU7WTWTAjn5N/lAQGjkwQArgJ1AFdpF0vUrosriyvTcZhp/DQck9bX q8MMjf0Z/x6jf1vS9RkSxwAilcnKdMRLp/uR4SNDttg85/XN8zZdlT/W3bVgU3RC 4vxKLdyYCiT/dq1HRGqJ5qg3vlt64yuOqdZE33QIjzpBauPSS52YVLzZ7TdhN8Vf epFY09jdA+8= =a1YP -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----