From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2002-09-12T06:17:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Multimethods (was Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Brannan" <pbrannan@atdesk.com>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2002 3:45 PM
Subject: Re: Multimethods (was Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby)


> On Thu, Sep 12, 2002 at 05:37:43AM +0900, Hal E. Fulton wrote:
> > Often I don't know I need something until I suddenly
> > have it. Then it's indispensable. Guess I'm just a
> > Blub programmer at heart. It *is* Blub, isn't it? :)
> 
> What's Blub?

Had to go and look it up again... turns out the term
is from Paul Graham, which I had forgotten.

See http://www.paulgraham.com/lib/paulgraham/sec.txt

In a nutshell: "Blub" is a fictitious language representing
your favorite middle-of-the-road language. When you look
at a less powerful language than Blub, you recognize it
as such.

But when you look at a *more* powerful language, you don't
recognize it as such, because it has unfamiliar features,
i.e., its paradigm is a superset of Blub's. You will
tend to think: Blub is better because it has everything
that's needed and doesn't have that useless weird extra junk.

But read the article, it's amusing and worth the time.

Hal