> Wait, oh man this is good. Ok, I totally missed this but did you actually advocate sex
> with goats or were you joking?
Giles was actually booted because he was hostile, abrasive, and
abusive during the poorly-executed mailing list transfer. He had been
filtering the Rails list to the trash and then the shift to a Google
group broke that filter, so he started getting dozens of mails–and he
like a few other folks got hyper-pissed off about the breaking of
their filters.
The mailing list transfer was poorly executed, but what happened after
that by certain select people affected by it was not a matter of
humour.
Surely there should be at least one Algollike language in that list -
it may now be the default way to "think about programming", but it had
to be instilled at some point.
martin
···
On 10/8/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:
But only two languages would "change the way you think about
programming." One was Lisp, and the other was APL. Since then, only two
more have come along that changed the way *I* think about programming --
Forth and Smalltalk.
Curiously, how does rails compare to Catalyst. I'm a long time Perl
programmer, and learned Catalyst before coming to Ruby and Rails. Now
I'm learning both Ruby and Rails. I'm having a lot of fun, but find my
lack of command of the language to be a real issue with gaining a
command of rails.
Just on the off chance nobody else speaks up, get a copy of David
Black's book "Ruby for Rails". It's tailor made for that purpose.
I thought Catalyst was cool, but too much of a moving target. I've
tended to work on a project then loose interest for a few months. When
I return the Catalyst framework had undergone many changes.
I think you'll find variations of this in all community-based projects.
Smaller projects are usually worse in that respect; if it's just a small
clique of developers and users with little external feedback, they'll
pretty much do what they want when they want.
I think Rails is a good bit less "life at the edge of chaos" than a lot
of other open source projects. And Ruby is even more stable -- I
personally think it's more stable than Perl 6, for example.
I don't know about other Python web app frameworks, but I don't think
it's fair to classify Django as a "Rails clone" or "copycat". Django and
Rails were developed independently more or less at the same time. And
they were both abstracted from different web apps. As a consequence,
there are some things that Django does well and Rails does poorly, and
vice versa.
I didn't know that. I'm not a Python guy.
I'm not at all sure the concepts of "expressive" or "dynamic" are the
real reasons Ruby programmers prefer Ruby to other languages. I think
its more that Ruby was a true object-oriented *programming language*
from birth, rather than having objects grafted on to what was
essentially a glorified UNIX shell with lots of C libraries. Early Perl
scripts, for example, looked a lot like cleaned-up C shell or Korn shell
scripts that used "grep", "sed", "awk", etc. to do the work.
Granted, the OO is a big part of it. The "expressiveness" of Ruby is
probably not separable from its OO, though the dynamism is.
I don't know about other Python web app frameworks, but I don't think
it's fair to classify Django as a "Rails clone" or "copycat". Django and
Rails were developed independently more or less at the same time. And
they were both abstracted from different web apps. As a consequence,
there are some things that Django does well and Rails does poorly, and
vice versa.
Can you elaborate on that? Your statement about the history of Django
is absolutely accurate, I should have phrased the question
differently. For what particular sort of problems would you recommend
Django over Rails?
The R folks I know do complexity theory, ABM, stuff like that.
My question may be too philosophical to have a useful answer. You
**could** write Rails in assembly if you really wanted to. The link
between a language and frameworks written in it may be too subtle to
draw useful conclusions from.
···
On 10/8/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:
Giles Bowkett wrote:
> Weirdly enough the only other place I've heard of R is the same place
> this question comes from. Anyway -- I'm also wondering if this is such
> a great thing, or just a sort of balkanization.
1. R is certainly not a "main stream" language in the sense that Perl or
Python are. In its original form, it was an open source dialect of the S
language. S in turn was a brilliant design by some people at Bell Labs,
and was based on Lisp and APL in semantics. It was dedicated to
scientific and statistical computing.
However, R has evolved to the point where you can do "Perlish" things
like regular expressions, GUIs, web servers and web applications and
other 21st century applications without leaving the language and its
contributed library packages. If I were starting this project over from
scratch, it would probably be all in R rather than mostly Perl with
escapes to R for the statistical computations and graphics.
But only two languages would "change the way you think about
programming." One was Lisp, and the other was APL. Since then, only two
more have come along that changed the way *I* think about programming --
Forth and Smalltalk.
Surely there should be at least one Algollike language in that list -
it may now be the default way to "think about programming", but it had
to be instilled at some point.
martin
For a very long time, most of my programming was in either Fortran or
macro assembler. I didn't get paid to program in something else until
the early 1990s. I certainly knew about Algol; it was a "theoretical
language" in the USA for the most part unless you happened to be
involved with Burroughs machines. But it never changed the way I thought
about programming.
When you come down to it, about the only things in Algol that weren't in
Fortran were recursion and the block structure variable name scoping.
And recursion is far more elegantly learned from Lisp!
···
On 10/8/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:
I don't know about other Python web app frameworks, but I don't think
it's fair to classify Django as a "Rails clone" or "copycat". Django and
Rails were developed independently more or less at the same time. And
they were both abstracted from different web apps. As a consequence,
there are some things that Django does well and Rails does poorly, and
vice versa.
Can you elaborate on that? Your statement about the history of Django
is absolutely accurate, I should have phrased the question
differently. For what particular sort of problems would you recommend
Django over Rails?
Well, I would favor Rails for applications like BaseCamp and Django for
applications like running a newspaper web site.
But seriously, folks, I don't know enough about Django to be able to
prefer it for anything -- I'm too far down the Ruby/Rails path and I
know *zero* Python. There was a whole conference last year comparing the
two frameworks, and the whole enchilada is on the web somewhere. I think
the conclusion was that they were both good, that Django could learn
from Rails and Rails could learn from Django, and that Rails would
always be in Ruby and Django would always be in Python. Google for
"Snakes and Rubies".
My question may be too philosophical to have a useful answer. You
**could** write Rails in assembly if you really wanted to. The link
between a language and frameworks written in it may be too subtle to
draw useful conclusions from.
I'm not sure how DHH and the original Rails team came to the decision to
extract Rails from BaseCamp and release it as an open source project.
Perhaps that's documented somewhere, but I personally haven't heard that
story.
But that's in fact what happened. DHH and his team built BaseCamp in
Ruby, using the tools available to them at the time. At some point, the
underlying components -- ActiveRecord, ActionPack, etc. -- were
extracted/abstracted/factored from BaseCamp and released as Ruby on
Rails. In any event, BaseCamp, Ruby, the early versions of Rails, DHH
and his team are probably inextricably intertwined.
But now, as an open source project with a much larger community, Rails
could very well evolve away from Ruby, although I don't know what
advantage there would be in that.Interestingly enough, Rails seems to be
Ruby's "killer app", but I don't know that *Rails* has -- or will ever
have -- a killer app of its own.
When you come down to it, about the only things in Algol that weren't in
Fortran were recursion and the block structure variable name scoping.
And automatic storage and adjustable arrays and the ternary operator (expressed with "if", "then", and "else" keywords), and structured programming and boolean variables.
And by-name passing, but the less said of that, the better.
About 90% of languages, including modern dialects of FORTRAN and COBOL take a large part of their DNA from ALGOL. Only SmallTalk, the LISP family, the APL family, and RPG have no significant ALGOL ancestry.
···
--
John W. Kennedy
"The blind rulers of Logres
Nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue."
-- Charles Williams. "Taliessin through Logres: Prelude"
I've seen "Snakes and Rubies" -- I got the impression that they didn't
really have people working on that stuff who knew the frameworks that
well. That's the problem, actually; there are so many languages that
even finding someone who could speak in detail on Django, Turbogears,
Rails, and Seaside would be unusual. This means that I'll probably
have to do it myself, and that means it probably won't happen for a
long time. (I'm supposed to be working now, in fact.)
···
On 10/8/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:
Giles Bowkett wrote:
>> I don't know about other Python web app frameworks, but I don't think
>> it's fair to classify Django as a "Rails clone" or "copycat". Django and
>> Rails were developed independently more or less at the same time. And
>> they were both abstracted from different web apps. As a consequence,
>> there are some things that Django does well and Rails does poorly, and
>> vice versa.
>
> Can you elaborate on that? Your statement about the history of Django
> is absolutely accurate, I should have phrased the question
> differently. For what particular sort of problems would you recommend
> Django over Rails?
>
Well, I would favor Rails for applications like BaseCamp and Django for
applications like running a newspaper web site.
But seriously, folks, I don't know enough about Django to be able to
prefer it for anything -- I'm too far down the Ruby/Rails path and I
know *zero* Python. There was a whole conference last year comparing the
two frameworks, and the whole enchilada is on the web somewhere. I think
the conclusion was that they were both good, that Django could learn
from Rails and Rails could learn from Django, and that Rails would
always be in Ruby and Django would always be in Python. Google for
"Snakes and Rubies".
Giles Bowkett wrote:
> My question may be too philosophical to have a useful answer. You
> **could** write Rails in assembly if you really wanted to. The link
> between a language and frameworks written in it may be too subtle to
> draw useful conclusions from.
I'm not sure how DHH and the original Rails team came to the decision to
extract Rails from BaseCamp and release it as an open source project.
Perhaps that's documented somewhere, but I personally haven't heard that
story.
It's documented. I've read it. It's relevant but it doesn't entirely
answer the question.
But it's all C under the hood, you know.
Are you sure? I think it's all assembler under the hood, although
somebody told me it was all circuit design under the hood, and I know
one guy who says it's all particle physics under the hood.
···
On 10/8/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:
When you come down to it, about the only things in Algol that weren't in
Fortran were recursion and the block structure variable name scoping.
And automatic storage and adjustable arrays and the ternary operator
(expressed with "if", "then", and "else" keywords), and structured
programming and boolean variables.
And by-name passing, but the less said of that, the better.
About 90% of languages, including modern dialects of FORTRAN and COBOL
take a large part of their DNA from ALGOL. Only SmallTalk, the LISP
family, the APL family, and RPG have no significant ALGOL ancestry.
Well, despite the fact that Chuck Moore cut his programming teeth on
Burroughs Algol before creating Forth, I think Forth has little Algol in
it other than the fact that it is stack-based.But C is a direct
descendant of Algol -- Algol --> CPL --> BCPL --> B --> C. That may not
be 90% of languages but it's got to be close to 90 percent of the code
that's executed every day.
Are you sure? I think it's all assembler under the hood, although
somebody told me it was all circuit design under the hood, and I know
one guy who says it's all particle physics under the hood.
You're very clever, young man, but it's turtles all the way down.
Well, despite the fact that Chuck Moore cut his programming teeth on
Burroughs Algol before creating Forth, I think Forth has little Algol in
it other than the fact that it is stack-based.But C is a direct
descendant of Algol -- Algol --> CPL --> BCPL --> B --> C. That may not
be 90% of languages but it's got to be close to 90 percent of the code
that's executed every day.
Not to mention that Pascal is also descended from Algol, thus taking in
things such as Delphi.
But Algol is descended from Fortran, which, yes, is still in use ALL
over the country.
Ah, grasshopper, but what are those turtles made of? Molecules =>
Atoms => Particles => Quantum effects
Unless Quantum Effects are turtles. <G>
By the way, I love those "Professor" jokes. Here are two more:
A linguistics professor was giving a lecture. He told the audience:
"Although there are many examples in many languages of a double
negative having the meaning of a positive. No examples have been found
of a double positive meaning a negative."
At which someone at the back of the hall said: "yeah, yeah".*
A student on the Princeton campus ran into Professor Einstein. The
famous theoretician said, "Excuse me young man, can you tell me where
the Faculty dining hall is?"
The student said: "It's right behind you professor,"
Einstein replied. "Then I must have already EATEN lunch!"
*that first one might not come across well in written form since it
depends on the 'yeah, yeah' being spoken in the right tone with the
second yeah in a lower tone than the first.
···
On 10/10/06, Martin Coxall <pseudo.meta@gmail.com> wrote:
> Are you sure? I think it's all assembler under the hood, although
> somebody told me it was all circuit design under the hood, and I know
> one guy who says it's all particle physics under the hood.
You're very clever, young man, but it's turtles all the way down.
Although COBOL is not my favorite tool, I don't know of
any arguably superior replacements for it (all things
considered) in the environments where it is used.
So, enjoy your sports car, but don't disparage the
semi in the next lane over...
Well, despite the fact that Chuck Moore cut his programming teeth on
Burroughs Algol before creating Forth, I think Forth has little Algol in
it other than the fact that it is stack-based.But C is a direct
descendant of Algol -- Algol --> CPL --> BCPL --> B --> C. That may not
be 90% of languages but it's got to be close to 90 percent of the code
that's executed every day.
Not to mention that Pascal is also descended from Algol, thus taking in
things such as Delphi.
But Algol is descended from Fortran, which, yes, is still in use ALL
over the country.
yeap... I've seen a lot of big 4x4 SUV downtown... not the environment where they should be used
:-))) lol
···
On 2006-10-11 07:49:35 +0200, Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com> said:
At 1:56 PM +0900 10/11/06, Hal Fulton wrote:
And let's not mention COBOL.
Although COBOL is not my favorite tool, I don't know of
any arguably superior replacements for it (all things
considered) in the environments where it is used.
So, enjoy your sports car, but don't disparage the
semi in the next lane over...
