Giles Bowkett wrote:
> Before I go any further I should point out that I have in fact been
> banned from the Rails list, probably for loud and vituperative
> criticism of the list itself, but possibly also for advocating sex
> with goats. (I have since made an effort at apology, although it seems
> to have been unsuccessful.) At any rate, that's one reason why I'm
> posting this question here, rather than on the Rails list.

I'm not in the general habit of feeding trolls, but in this case I think
I'll make an exception. If you want to be treated with respect, please
refrain from discussions of bestiality on a programming language forum.
It's inappropriate, illegal in most places, and just in general not
funny, if indeed that was your intent in claiming that you have
advocated it.

> Between "The Pragmatic Programmer," which advocates frequently
> learning new languages, and Bruce Tate's "Beyond Java", which spread
> the idea that Java's day is probably over, there's been a lot of
> interest in linguistic diversity recently in the general programming
> community. A conclusive answer to the question of whether or not Rails
> actually requires Ruby would go a long way to determining whether this
> interest in linguistic diversity is justified, or just a fad.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, or just old, but I'm not at all convinced that
"linguistic diversity", as you call it, or "too <expletive-deleted> many
<expletive-deleted> programming languages", :) as I sometimes call it,
is necessarily a "good thing". I personally find the constant switching
of syntactic and semantic gears between my two main programming
languages, Perl and R, jarring.

Of course, I've been programming a long time, starting with macro
assembler and FORTRAN in a time when Lisp and APL were "new kids on the
block." People who *haven't* learned new programming languages,
especially languages *semantically* orthogonal to ones that they are
familiar with, should of course learn new ones. But if you want to get
paid as a programmer, treat this as a way of making yourself a better
programmer in the languages you get paid to work in, rather than as an
"opportunity" to "proselytize" your newly-learned language, however
wonderful that language might be. :)