From: Christian Szegedy <szegedy@...>
Date: 2002-09-08T03:22:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

Denys Usynin wrote:
> Christian Szegedy wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.
> 

I knew only C and C++ (And a bit Basic and some assemblers) before Ruby.
I tried Perl,Python and Sather before trying Ruby (never more than 3
hours), and none of them made it. I simply did not like them.
They were too clumsy for me: at least I did not feel the urge because
I missed the high degree of satisfaction I feeled with Ruby.
I must admit, I did not try hard. I learnt tcl (after learning
Ruby, beacuse I must have), but it took much more time, and
I still have to look into the docs when using it.

The test I used for choosing my working language was the
simplicity of defining iterators. I always told everyone: there is one
feature C misses so desperatly: that you can't define functions
which call the block that follows them.
I thought of the syntax "void f(...,@x)"; Where @x would denote the
block succeeding f. I told everyone that C would be a ten times
better language, if it had this (seemingly unimportant) feature.
I found Sather which was quite OK in this regard, but it had a quite
unfamiliar syntax and it seemed that the project was dead.
In every new language I looked at, I checked
how simple or complicated is to define iterators. So I was clearly
impressed by seeing that Ruby features almost exactly the solution
I considered to be ideal. And even more simply: by using yield.
And all this together with a familiar syntax with lot of features,
open classes, completely object oriented etc. etc...

What I wanted to express: that it is simply false, that it was
only my previous experience that made Ruby so simple. In fact,
I could learn most languages in a week or so, but I'd be in trouble
if I had to write something practical after an hour.

Regards, Christian