From: Denys Usynin <usynin@...>
Date: 2002-09-08T01:42:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

Christian Szegedy wrote:
> 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 :))

Well this is like saying: Ruby is very natural and intuitive and you can 
learn it in 1 hour, but here's a catch: you have to master at least one 
other popular language first. Which may take you a year but nevermind that.
But at least in my personal experience (which I admit may be different 
from others) many good languages work exactly the same way and trying to 
say Ruby is special because of that isn't quite true. When I first 
learned Java after already knowing C++ pretty well, it didn't really 
surprise me and came quite naturally, even though admittedly it takes a 
lot longer to learn basic java than basic Ruby.