On 10/28/05, David A. Black wrote:
>
> I'd like to sound a note of caution about this.  I think it has the
> potential to disserve Ruby's interests, by moving the language away
> from the thing that has been proven to be so attractive.

I agree strongly with this, and the rest of David's comments. In fact
I'll go so far as to take the probably unpopular stance that most of
these "syntax discussions" are a big waste of time. Seriously, they
are like giant distributed committee meetings that spend days talking
and arguing and yelling to produce nothing valuable at the end. The
"named arguments" and "block syntax" related threads were just
ridiculous. There have been many others over the years.

Now matz and the other old-timers have never been ones to censure or
otherwise impede discussion on this mailing list, and I certainly
wouldn't do that either. But consider all the time people spend
writing kilobytes of text on this mailing list in fairly frivolous
discussions, and add to that all the time it takes other people to
read those kilobytes. Now what if that time were spent doing something
else? Like, say, coding new Ruby libraries! Or, even more crazy,
helping on YARV!

See, I'm a pragmatist (after all, it was "The Pragmatic Programmer"
that eventually brought me into the Ruby fray back in 2001.) I think
actions speak louder than words, and that the most useful discussions
on this mailing list involve someone posing a problem, and others
solving it in interesting and elegant ways.

So I don't see much value in these syntax discussion threads which
stretch into 100s of messages, especially when in the end, nothing
really valuable comes from them. Well, I'm probably being a little
harsh here...I imagine matz considers some of the ideas people make
and maybe those are things he hasn't thought of. But overall I think a
lot of time is wasted.

So, anyhow, before you decide that this really cool new syntax should
be put into Ruby, or before you decide to add your ever so important
opinion into these infinite threads, stop. Before posting, consider
how else your time could be spent.

Just something to thing about...

Regards,
Ryan