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Never heard of them. (heard of ruby only here, in YC). old wine in new bottles. if-then-else by any other name... is just as tedious.
by juwo 19y ago
Never heard of them. (heard of ruby only here, in YC).
old wine in new bottles.
if-then-else by any other name... is just as tedious.
- jaggederest 19y agoheh, that's what you think. Try building anything substantial in one of the languages I named and then going back to java. Ruby programs are maybe a tenth the size, give or take, Python similarly small. Haskell will blow your mind because you basically never use control structures or type declarations. Continuation-passing scheme, smalltalk, erlang... Any of these things will change the way you develop, probably immensely for the better.
- juwo 19y agocan I write a standalone desktop program in Ruby? (I dont know). BTW my feedback on your work http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17871 http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17871
- omouse 19y agoYes: http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.html http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.html Next time just Google for "Ruby standalone". Saves me the trouble of doing it for you ;)
- juwo 19y agoYou proved my point - for me - better than I could have done so myself :) If I have to google for it and come up with a 3rd party tool, then it isnt part of the language! And FYI, I wasnt writing my comment in complete ignorance nor laziness. I did go to the ror site when I first heard of it here on YC. When I realized it seemed to be a scripting language with a web server, I lost interest. Offline is very important for me/juwo.
- jaggederest 19y agotry python. well supported windowing toolkits. and it doesn't suck.
- dpapathanasiou 19y agoold wine in new bottles No, it's the difference between Turing imperative (e.g. C++, Java, etc.) and Lamdba calculus (lisp, erlang, ocaml, etc.) which is significant.
- juwo 19y agobut underlying it is a turing machine, right?
- dpapathanasiou 19y agoNo, Turing and Lambda are different ways of representing the same underlying assembly code. You're correct in that there is a direct line from the Turing imperative to the underlying assembly code, but given the choice between writing Lambda expressions or Turing expressions, why would you pick the latter?
- juwo 19y agoEven the lambda expression when running on the computer, is acting out a Turing machine; head travels over symbols on a tape, reads a symbol, changes state, stops or moves... that is what I meant by old wine in new bottles.
- dpapathanasiou 19y agoYou're correct, unless your hardware is specifically designed for lambda calculus (like one of those old lisp machines), lambda code gets compiled into Turing instructions. But why code in a Turing style (whether it's Java or assembly) when lambda programming is more efficient? That's the point all the lambda folks are making.
- juwo 19y ago"unless your hardware is specifically designed for lambda calculus (like one of those old lisp machines)" No, I am talking about - at a deeper level, all computing can be reduced to a Turing machine. (Unless you are reading Roger Penrose on consciousness). Maybe I am mistaken, I am out of touch.