From: William Djaja Tjokroaminata <billtj@...>
Date: 2002-09-06T03:28:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby aesthetics

Hi,

Thanks for the comprehensive discussion.  Technically, I don't have any
objection with everything that you said.  The point is, however, as
also already mentioned by some other people, to protect against the
"accidental" access by, say, mistyping.

When I write a code for myself, all languages are fine.  Even C (which has
almost nothing) is fine.  However, when I think that other people will
also use my code, then I have to start thinking about information
hiding.  I don't want the user of my code accidentally trash my code very
easily.  Yes, there are alrady mechanisms in Python to protect data, but
if it is not built-in into the language from the basic level (enforced),
not all the users will use it.  My assumption is that the user of my code
will be novice (who are not seasoned programmers, but more like network
engineers, for example), and his/her code may also be used by some other
users.  Therefore, I need a "simple" language with some decent data
protection.  In this regards, Ruby serves the purpose much better than
Python.

By the way, since it seems that you know so much about Python and there
seems to be some positive bias towards Python, may I know the reason you
are following this discussion group (to take the good ideas from Ruby to
be applied in Python, maybe, just like the iterators :) )?  I have left
the Python discussion group since I switched to Ruby.

Regards,

Bill
=========================================================================
Paul Prescod <paulp@prescod.net> wrote:
> (deleted)

> That's simply not true. Python has an explicit information hiding feature
> described above. You may or may not like it aesthetically as is your
> right. You may also think it is too far in one or the other direction in
> the safety/convenience spectrum. But you can't say it doesn't exist!

>  Paul Prescod