From: Andrew Hunt Date: 2000-12-13T11:04:32+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:7123] Re: Ruby in the US Dave says: >gavin@allegro.com (Gavin Scott) writes: > >> Randal L. Schwartz wrote: >> > But I'm still a bit puzzled about the *point* of Ruby. It's either >> > Smalltalk without the IDE, or Perl without the CPAN and >> > programmer/install base and wide ports, or Python without the annoying >> > "it'll be indented THIS WAY or Guido will come and get you" feature. >> >> > What do you want to accomplish with Ruby? >> >> Personally, I intend to use it to write computer programs. > >Pervert. Perversions aside :-), you can use Ruby for more than "just" programming. The syntax is clear enough that you can use it quite effectivley to specify programs intended to be written in other languages. Python was pitched as this sort of "active prototype specification language", but there's just too much Python in the way for that to work out real well. And it's *really* hard to try to do that in Perl -- I know, I've tried. >> > What do you want to accomplish with Ruby? I want to program without having to think about the programming language itself. I want to concentrate on the problem I'm trying to solve, not pesky engineering details -- there's plenty of languages that provide ample detail to drown in. IMHO, that's what makes Ruby different and useful. /\ndy -- Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC. Innovative Object-Oriented Software Development web: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com email: andy@pragmaticprogrammer.com -- Books by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas: "The Pragmatic Programmer" (Addison-Wesley 2000) "Programming Ruby" (Addison-Wesley 2001) --