“Mauricio Fernández” batsman.geo@yahoo.com wrote in message
news:20021008163621.GE10843@student.ei.uni-stuttgart.de…
This might sound wildly un-scientific, but I very much prefer matz’s
cautious approach, where features are added carefully and bad style
(such as the example you give) is discouraged by the language, to keeping
adding
feature after feature to Ruby until it becomes "interpreted Smalltalk +
Perl
- CLU + Algol + Lisp + C++ + ??"
This is very true - but I also think it is reasonable to discuss new
features.
Yeah, I enjoy this sort of discussions as much as anybody… But I have
had the feeling for some time that I can trust matz to come up with a
beautiful language, for he knows more than me on this subject. I realized
that he’s not only creating a language, but a “programming style”. He’s
performed great so far, and I don’t see why he would not in the future. I
feel Ruby as a language is really outstanding (maybe cause I haven’t
be exposed to many, 15 perhaps, and have only touched LISP dialects like
Scheme a little), but it’s a shame its implementation isn’t the absolute
#1, like I’d like it to be.
So I think I’ll spend more time thinking about how to enhance the
implementation, where I think I might be more helpful, than forcing matz
to waste his time explaining me things I should have studied more
about on my own. His time is more valuable than mine, so I had better
leave him keep doing his great work.
I’ll limit my postings on extensions to Ruby, because most of them have
already been deeply considered previously. I am a newcomer and I will
RTFM. I’ll correct people only when I’m quite sure I’m not talking
nonsense.
Having said that, the post above was more a rant on Bulat(?)'s
“aggresive” approach. Things like the email where he told that this mail
list was a place for us all to ask about computer languages
and him, matz and Guy to answer to us, which is both
- putting himself on matz’s (who has shown us the kind of things he’s
capable of) and Guy (who is AFAIK very intimate with Ruby and its
implementation, somebody about whom matz said that he’d like to be as
clever as him)
- stating that the ideas of everybody else aren’t worth his, and that
he has nothing to learn from the discussion.
And the “Ruby for Real Programmers” name: I found it quite offensive in
its context.
I don’t know his background. He surely does know a lot more than me on
computer languages. That’s OK, that’s not my business anyway, and I’m
still studying. But I found the “combination” of his emails
disrespectful.
Good design is about considering a lot of different options. Most are
discarded but all contribute to illuminate the problem at hand. Often a more
general solution can be found this way.
I think it is not helpful to discourage suggestions to new Ruby features -
especially because we know they are not going to be implemented lightly.
That said, suggestions could be presented in one or a few mails. They need
not take up 90% of the bandwidth.
I agree with you, as I said before, this was more a reaction to Bulat’s
lack of “style” (IMHO). I enjoy this kind of discussions, a lot. But I
don’t want to make others waste their times, so I’ll RTFM.
···
On Wed, Oct 09, 2002 at 08:10:46AM +0900, MikkelFJ wrote:
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Running Debian GNU/Linux Sid (unstable)
batsman dot geo at yahoo dot com
No, that’s wrong too. Now there’s a race condition between the rm and
the mv. Hmm, I need more coffee.
– Guy Maor on Debian Bug#25228
and syntax-in-small of ruby (operators) are derived most from