From: Mark Probert <probertm@...>
Date: 2002-09-07T07:05:07+09:00
Subject: RE: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

At 06:48 AM 9/7/2002 +0900, Drew wrote:
>[snip]
>
>And if that same procedural person has to re-organize his worldview to do
>everything in an OO-everwhere fashion, that person will be surprised over
>and over until he successfully changes his worldview.

I think you are right that it is the change in world view that
is the surprising part.  However, after some acquaintance with
more that one programming language, this is sort of expected.

Perhaps school's should be encouraged to think outside the Java/C/C++
idiom?  I would think that the surprise factor would be much less
prevalent if people had exposure to a bunch of vastly different
programming languages/environments.

Might I suggest:

+ C/C++/Java
+ Smalltalk/Ruby
+ Haskell/OCaml
+ LISP
+ FORTH
+ FORTRAN
+ COBOL
+ SQL
+ Oberon/Delphi

All of these approach problems in a different way and are optimised
for different solutions (even if many are "general programming
languages").

I like ruby, it is fun, quick and very flexible. It is ideal for
what I am doing at work at the moment (talking to network elements)
but I would be -very- surprised if I could embed it onto an 8-bit
micro-controller with 16k of memory ...



-mark.