Ladies and Gentlemen,
I’ve been trying to follow (whatever that implies for
those not within the
inner circle of the cognoscenti) this strange
discussion
about Unicode (my spell checker suggested Fungicide)
meeting Ruby. (Like Godzilla meeting Dracula or
whatever)
To me, incomprehensibility seemed in inverse
proportion to general relevance.
Now the tiring heroes seem to be withdrawing from the
battlefield without
really having produced any convincing position
statements.
So, maybe it’s been a red herring anyway, or a can of
worms that , like
Pandora’s box, that should rather have stayed
unopened.
Unfortunately, a great many important questions have
been left unanswered:
Where will I get my email client program that accepts
Devanagari, Arabic , Japanese,
Tibetan, cuneiform subject lines?
How will I be able to parse the mail text bodies,
extract keywords, produce
or consult dictionaries, put proper names of
geographic locations in their native
fonts on maps, produce multilingual/multi font
questionnaires and reports?
How will I bridge the gaps between web pages and local
GUI, how will I
make icons into font glyphs and vice versa?
How will I file gestures from Ameslan (American sign
language for the deaf),
or musical scores, or ballet choreography or the
Buddha mudras?
How will I exchange encoded information on these many
subjects with the
worldwide birds of my feather?
Could it be (Maybe I’m totally misguided in stating
this ) that notwithstanding its
glory and splendor, Ruby today is still another
skeletal or “glue” language,
that runs the risks of Narcissism, admiring and
further polishing
its own intrinsic beauty, its
scintillating jewel facets, without caring so much for
the starving makers of [earnestly] advanced
applications,
who want to make their Swiss watches run on “24
rubies” ?
You probably have read Matthew 7:6:
Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither
cast ye your pearls before swine,
lest they trample them under their feet, and turn
again and rend you.
The more serious modern position is that of the swine,
who are
heard to sigh: " Please, not pearls again! "
(Perl pun not intended)
I better stop here.
Jan
···
Does one snatch a cripple’s crutch away because
it is not the latest sort? Is it even enough to put
the latest sort in his hands?
He may not know how to use it.
But this is not an argument against the
latest sort of crutch.
John Fowles “The Aristos” , 1964
nb:
ppc is french and is an abbreviation of
“pour prendre congé”
= for saying goodbye
There was a time when the four corners of
visiting cards (= business cards) were
marked pf pour feliciter
pcd pour condoler
ppc pour prendre conge
i forgot the fourth
You’d fold or tear off the corresponding corner
and drop your card at your friends’.
Like 
and stuff.
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