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I programmed in Smalltalk in the 80s, and I loved it.  But, Smalltalk was a
terrible neighbor, it did not interact well with the other software on my
computer or my network.  Everything had to be Smalltalk's way or nothing.

When Ruby came along 10 years later, I was impressed by how careful the
developer was to play well with all the neighbors, even if this meant
forgoing the fancy IDE.  In my opinion, this allowed Ruby to grow and become
useful in so many different domains, whereas Smalltalk was stuck on the very
expensive engineering workstations.

In my opinion, it is much easier to learn Ruby with a good book (Pickaxe)
and a command line, than to try to convince your boss that you need that new
$$ workstation.

2009/7/30 pharrington <xenogenesis / gmail.com>

> On Jul 30, 10:11 am, Brian Candler <b.cand... / pobox.com> wrote:
> > Ian Hobson wrote:
> > > There was one attempt at a language that plugged together data flow
> > > pipes. I can no longer remember the name.
> >
> > Fantastic. That would let you store all programs as graphs, which could
> > be serialised as big blobs of XML for ultimate portability. Programming
> > could then become as simple as this:
>
> But if we're going to the point of serializing the program as XML, why
> not take the next logical step on simplify the XML in S expressions?
> Wait..
>
>


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Regards,

Ken

Seek wisdom through disbelief

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