From: Friedrich Dominicus <frido@...>
Date: 2002-08-27T15:41:28+09:00
Subject: Re: A Repeat: New Language After Ruby?

William Djaja Tjokroaminata <billtj@z.glue.umd.edu> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> Thanks for sharing your thoughts.  Is it really true that Ruby is in many
> ways a functional language?  I know that Ruby was influenced to a certain
> degree by Lisp, but can you elaborate on this further? 
The blocks are what makes Ruby so functional. I would argue those
blocks are what are called closures. But my Ruby is not good enough to
tellt that exactly.


> If Ruby indeed has
> some functional language nature, I will nominate Ruby as "the ultimate
> functional language" :), just like one C course instructor called C as the
> "ultimate assembly language".
> 
> I am almost at the point of deciding to learn a functional language.  The
> only problem is still the question, why Haskell?  Why not Scheme, ML, or
> Lisp, which have discussion groups?
Haskell is discussed in diverse Mailing Lists see haskell.org and in 
comp.lang.functional. Well Haskell is a good idea because it's sort of
"pure". ML would fit the same description. Common Lips and Scheme are
"more practical" the don't bann things for imperative programming, and
Common Lisp supports any kind of programmg style one can imagine. And
if it does not do the things you want it do do you extend Lisp to fit
your needs. I don't think it's a good idea to post Lisp code here,
therefor I invit you to check out
http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/

Not for the speed comparisoin but for the way things look may
look. Unfortunatly most of the programs have to be written to resemble
imperative programming style. That the real shortcoming. 

Regards
Friedrich