From: Mike Stephens Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby Subject: Re: functional paradigm taking over Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 07:31:34 -0500 Organization: Service de news de lacave.net Lines: 37 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: bristol.highgroove.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: talisker.lacave.net 1302611537 13665 65.111.164.187 (12 Apr 2011 12:32:17 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@lacave.net NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:32:17 +0000 (UTC) In-Reply-To: X-Received-From: This message has been automatically forwarded from the ruby-talk mailing list by a gateway at comp.lang.ruby. If it is SPAM, it did not originate at comp.lang.ruby. Please report the original sender, and not us. Thanks! For more details about this gateway, please visit: http://blog.grayproductions.net/categories/the_gateway X-Mail-Count: 381341 X-Ml-Name: ruby-talk X-Rubymirror: Yes X-Ruby-Talk: Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!news.stben.net!talisker.lacave.net!lacave.net!not-for-mail Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.ruby:2677 What we've seen here is some people - but not all - have a fixed frame of reference about what qualifies as a language. If you are religious the terms 'good' and 'evil' have a very clear and self-evident meaning. If you are an atheist they seem to be two sets of rather similar things that appear to be rather arbitrary. The Christian Old Testament said 'evil' was marrying people from other ethnic groups, whereas killing them and their animals was 'good'. The Christian New Testament changed those set memberships a bit. Ruby is a very powerful language that also has the merit of being able to express complexity in an elegant way. However if you don't particularly need all that power then you shouldn't write off languages which do some things easily but become contorted when you try and replicate complex Ruby capabilities. 'Domain Specific Language' is a perjorative term. It's just saying I can't conveniently do certain things I'm used to doing in the way I prefer. To say that matters, you need to show that typical domains definitely require such capabilities. My point earlier was not that I was a superior being (I don't know where that came from) but that from my experience in the oil, banking, insurance, corflakes and fragances business, most programming is using quite basic features. OK, that might not extend to nuclear fission reactors, but let's keep a sense of proportion here. There certainly is an argument that functional languages are more easily mapped to multi-core computers. If I buy one of those S-word platforms, I get sophisticated parallel processing built in for free. For Ruby, I would have to carefully program that as Ruby has no general purpose model/vocabulary/semantics for conveying or deducing dependancies. Or has it? -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.