From: William Djaja Tjokroaminata <billtj@...>
Date: 2002-09-10T23:54:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby aesthetics

Hi Dave,

Again, French and English have been very well established.  I am not
proposing removing "unless" from Ruby, or using the "unless macro" in
C.  But suppose we are designing a new language; we as intelligent human
beings, I think, should be able to answer the basic question, is it an
advantage or a drawback to have more varieties (like in Ruby) or bare
minimum (like in Python) in a programming language (which is by nature
different from a natural language)?  I think this is significant, because,
in my opinion, Python gets its attractiveness from its minimalist
principle ("there is only one way to do it"), and also in my opinion,
there is no doubt that new programming language designers will emerge, and
they need to learn a lesson from history, just like Ruby learns a lot from
Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, etc.  (I am not convinced, because of the Python
philosophy and experience, that the answer to this is simply "it does not
matter".)

Regards,

Bill
=============================================================================
Dave Thomas <Dave@pragmaticprogrammer.com> wrote:
> There are phrases in French that are very useful, and yet which have
> no direct English counterpart. Should we:

> 1. Translate them word for word, and insert them in to English?
> 2. Stop the French using them?
> 3. Celebrate the fact that different languages are different and get
>    on with the important business, which is using each effectively?

> If you don't like 'unless', then by all means don't use it. If others
> do, then I see no need to stop them.

> Cheers


> Dave