From: "James F.Hranicky" <jfh@...>
Date: 2002-09-07T09:08:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

On Sat, 7 Sep 2002 05:20:22 +0900
"Denys Usynin" <usynin@hep.upenn.edu> wrote:

> > The published C++ FAQ book is about 4" thick, after all, so I
> > submit that that language is actually FULL of surprises :-)
> > 
> > /\ndy
> > 
> 
> yeah and as I said, depending on your background , Ruby is just as full 
> of surprises as C++ is.

Wow, I couldn't disagree more. Thinking about C++ templates alone makes
my skin crawl.

> My guess is Ruby won't surpise you too much only if you have Perl/Python 
> background. That's it.

Coming from a perl background, I guess I can't answer this :->

> I am probably the only person in the world  who never used perl/python 
> :)  When I first needed a scripting language I just learned Ruby 
> instead. I love the language but I can by no means say it was natural 
> and not surprising to me. Quite the opposite, I had to adapt
> to the way Ruby's logic works and get the feel for it.
> 
> The great Principle is an empty sound. Larry  Wall should have never 
> mentioned it.

I think it's a fantastic principle when taken in context: The principle
of least suprise as seen by Matz. I look at what his vision produced and
am stunned by it's simplicity and power. As a sysadmin, the thing I 
liked most about perl was the ability to get to the OS while being able
to easily use higher level abstractions bafflingly (still) absent from
C such as hashes, arrays, and powerful regexp capabilities. 

Ruby has taken that concept that much further by providing an intuitive
OO framework that can achieve the same results, only in less code. The
fact that I can do this:

	ruby -e 'p File.stat("foo").mtime.to_i' 

without having to write it in C, or remember where mtime comes in the
array returned by perl's stat is awesome. And guess what? The whole language 
works that way! 

After years of wishing C had libraries with higher level abstractions,
and fumbling around with perl's not-so-great OO implementation, ruby
is a breath of fresh air, and although I've been suprised a couple of
times, for the most part, when I'm not sure how Ruby works in one
area, and I make a guess, it turns out I'm right. 

You may be right about the perl (python, C, C++, etc...) folks finding 
ruby to hold true to POLS. It's possibly because it's what we've always 
wanted but have never had, and we're just damn happy about it :->

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