What do you expect him to say?

Ruby Rocks and Perl Sucks.

No. In a nutshell he had some good things to say about Ruby.

Common, this is Larry Wall.

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Hunt [mailto:andy / toolshed.com]
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2002 10:48 AM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby



Larry Wall is reputed to have said:

    >For instance, I think it's a violation of the Beginner's Principle of
    >Least Surprise to make everything an object. To a beginner, a number is
    >just a number. A string is a string. They may well be objects as far as
    >the computer is concerned, and it's even fine for experts to treat them
as
    >objects. But premature OO is a speed bump in the novice's onramp. "

I think Larry's off his rocker on this one.  Consistency is far
more important than familiarity.  IMHO, Larry is demonstrating a
widely-held bias that objects are somehow "different" and should
be segregated and not taught to beginners.

I think that's a load of crap; exposing native types as non-objects
in Java, for instance, is to me one the largest failings of that language.

I thinks that's why so many people have trouble mastering OO concepts:
because it's taught as a sort of an add-on to already entrenched
procedural, linear thinking.  It's been my experience that you get
better mileage is you start with objects right out of the gate -- which
is exactly what Dave and I did in the pickaxe book.

To the best of my knowledge, not one reviewer or fan letter has yet
to criticize that decision.  Far from it -- every bit of feedback we've
gotten so far has been uniformly positive that we started right off
with objects, without excuses.

    >They may well be objects as far as
    >the computer is concerned

Actually, I think that's backwards -- I don't care *what* the
computer thinks about these things.  By the time it hits the
CPU it sure as hell isn't an object anymore.  *I* want to
to think of it as an object, and I want the other programmers
on my team to think of it as an object as well.

Just my humble $0.02.

/\ndy

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Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC.
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