From: patrick-may@... (Patrick May)
Date: 2002-09-07T14:21:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

Andrew Hunt <andy@toolshed.com> wrote in message news:<200209061748.g86Hm4R07334@toolshed.com>...
> Larry Wall is reputed to have said:
> 
>     >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. "
> 
> I think Larry's off his rocker on this one.  Consistency is far
> more important than familiarity.  IMHO, Larry is demonstrating a 
> widely-held bias that objects are somehow "different" and should 
> be segregated and not taught to beginners.

This part jumped out to me too.  To beginner (say my gf), 1 is a
number, and "This is a couple of things" is a quoted sentence. 
Strings are things that our cats play with.

When he says Beginner's Principle of Least Surprise, he seems to mean
programmers who learned C first.  That, to me, is a very strange
definition of a 'novice'.

~ Patrick