On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Robert Klemme wrote:

> "Curt Sampson" <cjs / cynic.net> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
> news:Pine.NEB.4.61.0501271018220.2459 / angelic-vtfw.cvpn.cynic.net...
>
>> But I would propose actually changing the language to better support
>> this sort of thing.
>
> I opt against this: not every good or useful language feature must be
> present in Ruby.

No. Ruby could end up being a second-rate language instead.

Look at Java. It was ten years behind the state of the art in OOP
when it was first made, has advanced little since, and its prospects
for real advancement are almost nil. (I'd bet that never going to
see continuations in Java, for example.) Java's already reliant on
precompilers for things like macros and aspect-oriented programming.

That's why I left Java for Ruby.

Lisp, on the other hand, in all of its various forms, is still one of
the most powerful programming languages in the world, and is still
being used to write new systems more than forty-five years after its
invention.

Ruby asked me to give up a lot of useful type checking in order to get
duck typing. It does not have to do so. If it continues to do so, one
day a language is going to come along that offers what Ruby does but
doesn't make this compromise, and people will start switching, just as
people are now switching from Perl to Ruby because Perl doesn't "need" a
better syntax for OO work.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs / cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.NetBSD.org
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