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I'm sorry, but I really don't follow at all. You call this approach heavy handed when in fact it's relatively small amount of source code that makes for much mo
by colbyh 12y ago
I'm sorry, but I really don't follow at all. You call this approach heavy handed when in fact it's relatively small amount of source code that makes for much more readable developer code down the line. To me, Maybe seems like a much lighter touch than monkey patching Object.
And I don't understand your insistence that you're "writing another language" in Ruby by using a few functional constructs. For a language that uses .each as its base iterator and encourages you to pass blocks around it seems quite fitting, in fact.
Anyways, probably going to have to agree to disagree here. I come from the "every good language is a shitty lisp" school of thought so my personal lens might just not line up with yours.
- vinceguidry 12y agoI went through HtDP and loved it, it helped me gain a data-centric view on programming, and the lessons carried very well into my later Ruby career. I looked at Arc and liked the idea. I like Ruby better than Lisp. It's hard to explain why. One of the reasons why I like to argue about this sort of thing on the Internet is because it helps me isolate the subtler qualities of different styles of programming. I like Ruby because you can build a community around it, in a way that I don't think you can build one around Lisp, at least not like the one you find in Ruby, with the massive quantities of libraries and such. Lisp is too free-form. You almost never need the power it gives you, and it encourages people to build their own language features where the problem being solved could probably do with a more conventional approach. Ruby hits a sweet spot, enough dynamism to where you don't feel constrained, not so much that you can't easily reason about code. Code as data is a neat idea, but code needs to be read by humans and that's the harder task.