On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, Nicholas Van Weerdenburg wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 15:57:32 +0900, Mathieu Bouchard <matju / sympatico.ca> wrote:
> > Ruby allows you to play in the swamp, but it doesn't mean it's better to
> > play in the swamp: rather see it as an opportunity to build your own raft,
> > hopefully better than the one-size-fits-all raft provided with your
> > standard static-language.
> > [...]
> My recent thought was that this should emerge as the result of good
> programming practice. If you have complexity that requires a protocol,
> then there is probably a module that already emerged and fills the
> need- e.g. Enumerable, Comparable, IO, etc.

There are indeed protocols that emerge rather often when you program, but
there are also many protocols that you have to cook up yourself... and
possibly make modules for.

> I'm now thinking that explicitly thinking about protocols and
> implementing them in a top-down manner is often not so necessary for
> this reason.
[...]
> Finally, this implies a bottom-up style of programming, and that is
> something of a personal style. So explicity protocols may help people
> decompose and think about there program while writing it.

I don't get the top-down style and bottom-up style anymore. I don't know
why there should be an opposition between two so-called approaches, when
clearly to me, they are complementary processes. Both should be used all
of the time; that's how you build a healthy network of relationships in
your programs.

Maybe we really don't think of the same top-down (breaking down problems)
and same bottom-up (merging up solutions). To me, any of the two can lead
to any structure of code. Bottom-up can grow methods, protocols, classes,
whatever, as they are just tools to fulfill the goal of bottom-up, which
is to merge.

> Of course, this implies well written programs, which is not the norm
> in the world. Which again makes me think of the possible distinction
> between pack-programming languages and hacker languages.

You've been reading Reciprocality Theory or what ??

> And like extreme programming, most early large Ruby programs will be
> probably be done by smaller groups of the leading lights of the Ruby
> community. That might not generalize well to the world-at-large.

I'm not discussing those things for the world-at-large. Who knows how the
world-at-large works anyway?

_____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard -=- MontrñÂl QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju