From: Mark Slagell <mslagell@...>
Date: 2000-10-23T03:25:33+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:5756] Re: Array#insert


> 
> Yes, but destructiveness is not bad in general,

Sure, that I agree with. Otherwise I'd be a Lisp devotee I suppose, and
not hanging around here bothering people. :-)

> especially in
> object-oriented programming, it's part of the nature.

But that puzzles me. I don't view functional style and the OO paradigm
in any kind of conflict, unless one takes the former to its
bondage-and-discipline extremes; the flexibility of OO is such that it
supports a functional style at least as well as the parentheses-laden
languages we love to hate.  To say "line=f.readline.chomp" instead of
"line=f.readline; line.chomp!" means to already be thinking
functionally, but it's all a matter of degrees.

I recognize that choices made about a language's syntax and libraries
both reflect and reinforce a particular programming style, or range of
styles -- it starts and ends with the author, with small influences from
the community along the way, and that's as it should be.  A wish to be
able to stay a good distance away from Perl underlies much of my
squeaking here, speaking in the definite minority on most of these
issues. Ruby still seems like the closest thing out there to what I
want, so I don't mean to be pushy about it.

  Mark