From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2003-12-03T00:52:17+09:00
Subject: Re: anything disappearing from Ruby for 2.0?

Hi --

On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Chris Uppal wrote:

> T. Onoma wrote:
> 
> > > [...]  Ruby *so nearly* fits the bill -- kinda fustrating ;-)
> >
> > I really don't understand this. You won't use Ruby b/c it has some EXTRA
> > Perl-like features?
> 
> Yes, that's right.
> 
> Elegance, simplicity, clarity -- the things that (IMO) are necessary for a
> language to have that "effortless" feeling -- are dependent (among other
> things) on a reasonably complete absence of clutter and other warts.
> 
> For *me* the stuff starting on p216 of the pickaxe is a long list of warts.  (I
> emphasise that I'm not knocking Ruby; it's just that its current form is
> optimised for use in a certain way -- shortish scripts -- that I'm not
> interested in, and so those features of the language add clutter without
> providing compensating value.)

You can write short programs in Ruby, but it's not optimized one way
or the other in that regard.  Speed can be an issue, but there's
nothing whatsoever in Ruby's syntax or design to stop one from writing
longer programs.  (Rich Kilmer and Dave Thomas among others can bear
witness to this :-)  In sum, Ruby is a nice general-purpose programming
language; it's not an admin-script niche tool.


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net