From: Christian Szegedy <szegedy@...>
Date: 2002-09-07T21:01:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

Denys Usynin wrote:

> I think this whole Least Surprise Principle is a load of bullshit that 
> is invoked far too often for no good reason. It has a fancy name, but I 
> translate it to myself as "when matz made Ruby he made sure the way it 
> worked made sense to him". Excuse me, isn't it how all languages are(or 
> should be) made?

    I was able to use Ruby quite well 1 hour after downloading it.
    And I used most features without reading any docs at all,
    just by guessing it based on common sense considerations. (In all
    other languages I know, there were always surprising details I had
    to learn before using a particular feature.) This attribute of
    Ruby became quite conscious before I had learn the phrase "principle
    of least surprise". For me, it was not a buzzword but the label
    of a concrete psychological experience I made. But, of course, this
    is fairly subjective and other people may not had the same
    experience, but this is no reason to tell us that it does not exist.
    I could demonstrate it to my brother also: I taught him Ruby half an 

    hour long, then I asked him "how would you do this or this more
    conveniently? He always told the best way according to him (sometimes
    it was a feature he knew from Java, sometimes it was something he
    knew from Maple, sometimes just a common sense solution he thought
    it was most appropriate. Most worked quite well in Ruby :))

 > Excuse me, isn't it how all languages are (or should be) made?
    Yes, they ***should*** be, but ***are*** they?

> It is a good language simply because it was written by a good programmer; 

   No, it is a good language because it was written by a
   good psichologist, and aesthetist.

   Programming skills are "only" a guarantee that it works, but do
   not say anything about the quality of the language.

Regards, Christian