From: Gavin Sinclair Date: 2002-09-08T01:36:47+09:00 Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby ----- Original Message ----- From: "William Djaja Tjokroaminata" > He, he, I think Larry Wall really got himself into trouble this time. The > first time I learned Ruby, I didn't use OO feature at all; I just did > "straight" procedural programming in a script: > > a = ... > b = ... > c = a * b > def func (x) > .... That's something that's too often forgotten. Procedural is really a subset of OO. You can write a (high-level) C program within Java. One student I know did it as a protest. 500 lines inside main(). Not even any functions. As far as I know, he now works for Red Hat. People often complain about OO for no good reason whatsoever. Larry must have had too much sun recently for him to bark about OO in Ruby! > Then finally, after I learned all the OO stuff, I got the quite pleasant > surprise, that I actually already programmed in OO since the beginning as > the simple script above is actually inside the class Object. What can be > better than this? Even in Java people have to be choked with endless > keywords and object stuff since the beginning. I would not hesitate to > say that Matz is much more genius than Larry! Whoa! Larry Wall is an extremely clever man. Perl is a major work of modern art, as ugly as all the rest of modern art. This is potentially flamewar territory (though this group usually survives those pretty well), but let me just say politely that Ruby borrows a lot from Perl - both in positive features to extract and negatives to leave behind. > Regarding the keyword "my", my philosophy is always less typing is better > (unless we are paid by the hour :) ). To me, the use of "@" for > instance var and nothing for local var is one of the best, if not *the > best* way in designing a language. As I already wrote before, there is no > comparison between Perl and Ruby, well, ... except probably for CPAN... Right on. Dig it. > Regards, > > Bill --Gavin