From: "Rimantas Liubertas" <rimantas / gmail.com>
>From: "Jenda Krynicky" <jenda / cpan.org>
>> And for the semicolons making every line look ugly ... every sentence in
>> english ends with a dot, except for those that end with a question or
>> exclamation mark. Does that make the sentences ugly?
> 
> In English you do not write every sentence on the separate line, hence
> the need to have something to mark the end of the sentence.
> Same in Ruby, if you put several statements in one line you use semicolons
> to separate them.

Precisely.  Further, when we do write phrases on separate lines in English,
as in poetry, punctuation is placed where it belongs, not forced to appear
unnecessarily at the end of every line.


>From: "Jenda Krynicky" <jenda / cpan.org>
> I don't think people get drawn to Ruby because of pretty syntax. I think 
> it's all marketing. Ruby on Rails is (or is it still?) hip. The new cool 
> kid on the block.

To paraphrase David Heinemeier Hansson, "f*ck rails."

<grin>

Many on this list have been using ruby long before rails existed.

I was drawn from perl to ruby, eight years ago, because ruby (matz) had
achieved the seemingly impossible: an elegant synthesis of smalltalk and
perl.

I don't feel the need to use OO for everything, but I like OO as a tool.
And OO programming in perl _sucked_.  I used to think it was neat that
OO was grafted onto perl with the addition of a single keyword to the
language.  But it was such a pain to write OO code in perl, that I rarely
made the effort--even when I really wanted an object.  I can still recall
those disappointing deliberations: wow, this bit of functionality I'm about
to implement would be ideal as an object, . . . but . . . eyuuuch . . . too
much of a pain in the ass.  So, yes: syntax matters.


Regards,

Bill