On 30.07.2009 11:23, Mike Stephens wrote:
> I've just been re-reading Byte August 1981 - an edition dedicated to
> Smalltalk-80. Often people say Ruby has roots in Smalltalk (amongst
> other things) but the thing you notice is Smalltalk is visual ie it has
> a graphical interface. How is it that 28 years later we work by typing
> text into an editor?

I do not know a programming language for which the basis is not text. 
So, text usually comes first and then there are tools which help you 
produce this text.  This is actually a quite nice separation IMHO 
because you can pick the type of tool you prefer (text editor, UML, 
integrated IDE, GUI builder).

Despite the old fashionedness of typing text that your question suggests 
there seem to be quite many people which are happy typing program code 
with a text based tool.  In Ruby it is actually quite easy compared to 
other programming languages because of the clean syntax which helps a 
lot reduce the overhead (just think of all the semicolons in Java...).

Kind regards

	robert

-- 
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
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