From: Tom Sawyer <transami@...>
Date: 2003-01-26T13:40:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Why "like Perl"?   was: RAA proposal

On Saturday 25 January 2003 09:12 pm, Ryan Pavlik wrote:
> 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.

AGREED

i'll take it a bit futher. Strive to do more, be more, and learn from others.

It would be quite something if the RAA could organize a giant hiearchy of 
Class/Module structure for its libraries. (Applications are another matter). 
throughout the hiearchy there would be points of install where the library 
needs to be raainstall'd.

::TextProc
	::Markup::
		::YAML
			::YAML4R   <--- install point

you can take this down to the nitty gritty (read ::load after YAML4R) and have 
the RAA also serve as a reasonable source of documentation for everything!

now how do you get programmers to play nice? that's another question.

-- 
tom sawyer, aka transami
transami@transami.net