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James Britt wrote:
>> There *are* good, useful definitions of what constitutes a functional
>> languages, and Ruby does not match the criteria for most of them.
>> Probably the most fundamental of all criteria is that the language
>> does not allow side-effects, such as assignment.
We're OT now, but my ignorance of FP is such that I can't imagine
a language without assignment.
> Interesting. Paul Graham, author of a few books on Lisp, has a new book
> out called Hackers and Painters. It's a collection of essays, most if
> not all of which are, I believe, on his web site (paulgraham.com).
I might have to buy that, web or not. Paul Graham is cool. I find him
to be clever, profound, and insightful. (As opposed to most of us who
struggle simply to be clever and profound.)
> There's an essay ("Revenge of the Nerds") toward the end of the book,
> part of sequence that sings the praises of (surprise) Lisp, and in it he
> mentions that many of the newer programming languages seem to follow a
> pattern of each one (perl -> python -> ruby ) being increasingly more
> like Lisp. Ruby is mentioned only sporadically in his book, and mostly
> in the latter chapters, but in this essay he goes so far as to say that
> if you showed Lisp to hackers in 1975, and said it was a dialect of Lisp
> with some syntax added, no one would argue otherwise.
You must mean: s/showed Lisp/showed Ruby/
Correct?
Hal