From: William Djaja Tjokroaminata Date: 2002-09-13T22:03:10+09:00 Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby Hi, I believe what is considered "simple" and/or "easy" really depends on the person and his background or field. Assembler is probably simple for the person who designed it, but not easy for the programmer who will use it. C is probably simple and easy for a person who has to write a C compiler, but not easy for people who have to write high-level applications. Finally, this is just my guess, probably Python syntax and keywords are easier for scientists with Fortran background, but Ruby is simpler and more natural for the real programmers. One case that has been mentioned before is for some people, the notion "for i in collection do" is more natural than "collection.each do i". Of course, now for me the iterator syntax is very natural and consistent. However, I would guess that a lot of scientists and engineers probably will raise their eyebrows the first time they see the iterator format. (The first time I read about the blocks in the Pickaxe book, I was CLU-less :), as the book also mentioned that it is borrowed from the CLU language.) Regards, Bill ============================================================================ Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote: > Hi, > In message "Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby" > on 02/09/12, Friedrich Dominicus writes: > |> And I believe a good language design lies somewhere between these two > |> extreme spectrum. Because "ordinary people" often feel uncomfortable > |> in extreme situation. We don't use the simplest language ever > |> (machine instruction) anymore. We don't use the most complex language > |> either (Ada? PL/I? whatever). It's the matter of balance. > | > |I agree, but I don't think Assembler is a good example for a simply > |language. I'll tell you why I think so. Assembler programmer must know > |extremly much about different memory access models. This is > |complex. Therefor I don't think Assembler can be a simple > |language. The other thing which makes it complex that you must do it > |all by hand, you have to know exactly how the processor at hand > |works, and you must know that types there are and this book-keeping > |has to be done by you. Therefor Assembler is not easy, as describe here > |C or Pascal are easy. (and a bunch of others too) > I said "machine instruction" that is a sequence of bytes. No syntax, > no keyword, anything can't be simpler as a language. But of course as > you said it requires bunch of knowledge for programmers. > A simple thing is not a easy thing. > matz.