"David A. Black" <dblack@wobblini.net> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:Pine.LNX.4.44.0408190521440.25339-100000@wobblini...
It's time for us to break the cycle and declare ourselves to have Ruby
backgrounds. As much as we love Ruby, the community suffers from an
inferiority complex: people are constantly doing this or that, or
asking that such-and-such be added to Ruby, because of what is done in
other languages. Yes, Ruby is a modern, combinative language with all
sorts of roots in other languages. But it is not a pastiche; it's a
real language, with a non-trivial userbase and non-negligible history
of usage.
Richard, I certainly don't mean to jump down your throat. For some
reason the spirit happens to move me at this moment to comment on this
in some depth. I've spent almost four years listening to people talk
about "coming from Java" and "being used to Perl" and so on, as
rationales for both unconventional stylistic practices and language
change requests. Sticking just to the former for the moment: I
believe that Matz and his colleagues came up with something really
elegant-looking and consistent as they developed traditional Ruby
style. I think it's a pity to take the style apart and reassemble it
based on isolated decisions about small subsets of it -- especially
when those decisions are made on the basis of practices and
conventions from other languages.
I agree with you entirely - it's up to me to find out about idioms that the
communitity use, rather than suggest they adopt strange foreign ideas from
other languages.
One thing that pains me slightly about the 'Groovy' language is that they
think 'javans' can't learn ruby because it has insufficient curly brackets,
and therefore they have to re-invent the wheel.