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But Ruby is still OOP right? And these syntatic sugars don't really change the way people program in a hardcore way no? Basically this is another way to make y

But Ruby is still OOP right? And these syntatic sugars don't really change the way people program in a hardcore way no? Basically this is another way to make your loop looks nicer but nothing more. You could argue this case if the language in the topic is something like LISP or Haskell compare to the C-based languages.

palish 19y ago
But.. Erm.. making a program nicer is the sole purpose of all high level programming languages. Programmers read a lot more than they code. The nicer it makes your program, the more powerful it is.
- gscott 19y ago
  As pretty as it may be, picking a language is an important choice, the oldest web application I have designed has already been online for 7 years and I expect it to last more or less forever. So making a choice of language is important, jumping on the bandwagon of the latest and greatest (and it does sound pretty good) might be a problem later on. My point was more about making a long term decision.
  - davidw 19y ago
    This is a calculation that depends entirely on your circumstances. As a startup, you want to get the best product out to as many people as fast as possible, 7 years in the future be damned. Other circumstances (such as being a big corporation) demand more attention to other aspects such as maintainability.
DocSavage 19y ago
There's more to a language than whether it's object-oriented or not. It sounds like you are saying, well it's just OOP so it's not any different than C++. It's almost like saying "CLOS is still OOP, right?" Yes, Ruby is dynamic. It's so dynamic that you have open classes so you can dynamically insert methods. It has deep introspection. It has closures. It has #method_missing which lets you do some interesting things. Basically, Ruby is just powerful enough, just over that tipping point, so programmers wind up doing metaprogramming (programs that write programs) more than they would in other languages. I'm sure Paul Graham has an article or two on the power of languages (smiley face here), and in at least one of them, he suggests that some people might mistake Ruby for a dialect of LISP. See why_the_lucky_stiff's tutorial on D&D metaprogramming (Dwemthy's Array section at http://qa.poignantguide.net/chapter-6.html http://qa.poignantguide.net/chapter-6.html) and Rich Kilmer's use of Ruby for an aircraft management DSL (you'll have to google for that example). It's not that metaprogramming is impossible in C/C++ because you could always build a whole mechanism from the ground-up. (In other words, at some point you can claim that all these languages are Turing equivalent if I remember correctly.) The point is that some languages make interesting ways of programming easier, and when you hang out among the practioners of that language, you begin to see different ways of coding. This is why I've got Erlang on my TODO list, if I can squeeze it in my schedule.

palish 19y ago

But.. Erm.. making a program nicer is the sole purpose of all high level programming languages. Programmers read a lot more than they code. The nicer it makes your program, the more powerful it is.

gscott 19y ago
As pretty as it may be, picking a language is an important choice, the oldest web application I have designed has already been online for 7 years and I expect it to last more or less forever. So making a choice of language is important, jumping on the bandwagon of the latest and greatest (and it does sound pretty good) might be a problem later on. My point was more about making a long term decision.
- davidw 19y ago
  This is a calculation that depends entirely on your circumstances. As a startup, you want to get the best product out to as many people as fast as possible, 7 years in the future be damned. Other circumstances (such as being a big corporation) demand more attention to other aspects such as maintainability.

DocSavage 19y ago

There's more to a language than whether it's object-oriented or not. It sounds like you are saying, well it's just OOP so it's not any different than C++. It's almost like saying "CLOS is still OOP, right?" Yes, Ruby is dynamic. It's so dynamic that you have open classes so you can dynamically insert methods. It has deep introspection. It has closures. It has #method_missing which lets you do some interesting things. Basically, Ruby is just powerful enough, just over that tipping point, so programmers wind up doing metaprogramming (programs that write programs) more than they would in other languages. I'm sure Paul Graham has an article or two on the power of languages (smiley face here), and in at least one of them, he suggests that some people might mistake Ruby for a dialect of LISP. See why_the_lucky_stiff's tutorial on D&D metaprogramming (Dwemthy's Array section at http://qa.poignantguide.net/chapter-6.html http://qa.poignantguide.net/chapter-6.html) and Rich Kilmer's use of Ruby for an aircraft management DSL (you'll have to google for that example). It's not that metaprogramming is impossible in C/C++ because you could always build a whole mechanism from the ground-up. (In other words, at some point you can claim that all these languages are Turing equivalent if I remember correctly.) The point is that some languages make interesting ways of programming easier, and when you hang out among the practioners of that language, you begin to see different ways of coding. This is why I've got Erlang on my TODO list, if I can squeeze it in my schedule.