From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2002-11-04T05:34:35+09:00 Subject: Re: Thoughts on Ruby On Mon, 4 Nov 2002 05:14:59 +0900, Albert Wagner wrote: > On Sunday 03 November 2002 1:43 pm, Austin Ziegler wrote: > >> ...too many symbols... >> ... it doesn't read naturally... >> ... It looks odd... >> ...harder to read... >> ...it doesn't seem as natural... > > I don't agree, but I understand :-) I am also a believer in bio- > diversity. I would appreciate it if you don't necessarily cut the context from my statements, because they're quite specific. To pull something random from Seaside: !IAPage methodsFor: 'accessing' stamp: 'AB 2/17/2002 20:46'! withAllChildrenDo: aBlock aBlock value: self. children ifNotNil: [children do: [:c | c withAllChildrenDo: aBlock]]! ! As I said before, I don't "get" Smalltalk. However, what I can see here is that there's four different symbols (!, :, |, []), and at least one of them does double-duty (:). It's not very clear at all -- in a reading sense -- what this does. I suspect that the equivalent Ruby is more readable, not least because it uses fewer symbols. (Note: we may actually be in violent agreement here, given your comments regarding "images", but I'm not sure.) Also, my comments on RPN (and thus Forth and, at least to some degree, Smalltalk) are simply empirical in nature. We don't generally teach people 3 3 + when we're teaching math. It doesn't follow most human languages in order -- it's SOV ("three and three add") where as most human languages are SVO ("three add three") or VSO ("add three and three"). It requires a different sort of logic to read SOV-ordered concepts. When you add these two items together, then it's not a leap to suggest that Smalltalk is harder to read and it doesn't seem as natural as a "conventional" language. This doesn't mean that Smalltalk is better or worse, but just *harder* to read. -austin -- Austin Ziegler, austin@halostatue.ca on 2002.11.03 at 15.19.34