From: Alan Chen <alan@...>
Date: 2002-09-07T03:10:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby



On Sat, Sep 07, 2002 at 02:31:49AM +0900, Phil Tomson wrote:
> http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/06/1343222&mode=thread&tid=145
>
> "For instance, I think it's a violation of the Beginner's Principle of 
> Least Surprise to make everything an object. To a beginner, a number is 
> just a number. A string is a string. They may well be objects as far as 
> the computer is concerned, and it's even fine for experts to treat them as 
> objects. But premature OO is a speed bump in the novice's onramp. "
> 
> Personally, I like Ruby's scoping rules a lot better than Perl's.
> 
> Also, I think that everyting being an object is actually helpful for 
> beginners - It's much easier to pick up OO programming ideas if you learn 
> them first, I think.  It also tends to make things much more consistent.

A total beginner, I think, would have the same amount of difficulty
learning OO vs. non-OO languages.  For a beginner to ruby, but not to
programming, I would think that the learning curve would be strongly
background dependent.

Having recently dived into a perl project for a client after a short
vacation from perl, I'm finding that having everything OO in ruby
makes it much easier to lookup functions and operators in code and
documentation.  For rarely used perl functions, I find that I have to
go poking around in the docs about twice as long to locate the
reference info I want.


-- 
Alan Chen
Digikata LLC
http://digikata.com