From: Ryan Pavlik Date: 2003-01-26T13:12:39+09:00 Subject: Why "like Perl"? was: RAA proposal On Sun, 26 Jan 2003 11:17:12 +0900 Daniel Carrera wrote: > On Sun, Jan 26, 2003 at 10:57:28AM +0900, Jim Freeze wrote: > > > Hmm... this was discussed some time back. I'm not sure we can come > > up with a comprehensive top level list. > > Sure we can. The Perl guys do, other projects do, why can't we? > We just need generic top-level categories. Perhaps add a "Misc" > category for stuff that truly doesn't fit anywhere. > I've been watching the various discussions about RAA stuff, and I keep wondering to myself, "why does it have to be 'like Perl'?" I understand the desire to get programmers---and since Ruby was written as a successor to Perl, the pool of Perl programmers seems like the natural source. I must ask, though, why copy what Perl has and does? What makes Ruby superior to Perl are the things _unlike_ Perl. The holdovers are being discouraged (punctuation variables and the like). So why blindly copy what Perl has in an effort to appease a group who may not be happy no matter what you do? You can make Ruby and its community more and more like Perl until it's equivalent to Perl, but then it's not Ruby anymore---and probably no one will be happy. Now, I understand the sentiment about making the RAA a bit more visible in an effort to promote the capabilities of the language, and grow from there. But most of the categorization I've seen hasn't been very Ruby-like. Ruby is all about writing classes and using objects. Therefore, the proposed application-oriented categorization strikes me as illogical. Shouldn't any categorization instead be focused around classes? Instead of, for instance, "Multimedia", "Audio", and "Graphics"; would it not be better to have "Image", "Video", "Audio::Digital", "Audio::MIDI", and the like? Work on providing classes for covering all functionality, in a uniform manner, instead of a smattering of uncoordinated efforts. When it comes to names, lots of things are available (assume .com, .net, or .org)..."ruby-aa", "rubyclass", "rubylib", "rubytome", etc. Anyway, just my 0b11. -- Ryan Pavlik "What part of this whole villain thing do you not understand?"