That really put a smile on my face - thanks!

I've been kicking the tyres on ruby for a while now, but only recently 
wrote a "proper app", by which I mean completely test-first, cleanly 
refactored, etc. The signal to noise ratio is awesome, coming from a 
Java background by way of C++ and Perl. I write a failing test, write 
about 3 lines of really clean Ruby code, and the test passes. Where's 
the casting? Where's the Foo foo = new Foo() verbosity? Interfaces? 
Dynamic proxies? Woohoo - I don't need any of that nonsense!

I've written object-oriented Perl systems - and no, it's not pretty! - 
and I often describe Ruby as the bastard offspring of Perl and Smalltalk 
(well come on - they aren't exactly married are they?).

It seems to me the reason Ruby is so Perl-friendly is a deliberate 
tactic to encourage Perlmongers wanting to try out Ruby, rather than 
thinking "that's a really clear, intuitive syntax - let's do it that 
way!". It's all implemented as syntactic sugar around a pure 
object-oriented language anyway, and as I am discovering the Ruby Way of 
doing things like blocks, iterators, mixins etc. the Perl and Java 
syntax just feels clumsy. (My first attempts at Ruby looked a lot like 
Java - no surprise there then - but now they look a lot more like Ruby :)

Just the confused ramblings etc.,
Dan

ps. Just noticed 5.times do |i| ... end. This language rocks!


Ben Giddings wrote:

> On Thursday, August 7, 2003, at 10:47  PM, Tim Hammerquist wrote:
>
>> To liken this to natural languages, isn't this much like the
>> French condemning Latin for it's foolish practice of conjugation?
>
>
> Naah, it's more like how teenagers are so incredibly embarrassed to be 
> seen with their parents.  Sometimes the teenagers are overly sensitive 
> about their parents' flaws.  Sometimes, they are simply right.  I 
> mean, black socks with flip-flops?  C'mon!
>
> Perl is fun.  If there were no Ruby I'd probably still use it.  Doing 
> OO-ish programming in Perl... that's black socks and flip-flops.
>
> Ben
>
>
>