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comp.lang.ruby

A Ruby-relevant quote from Alan Kay

Curt Hibbs

2/10/2005 6:18:00 PM

ACM Queue just published an interview with Alan Kay (the creator of
Smalltalk), and there was one quote from the interview that I really liked
because I think that this is the approach that Matz took with Ruby:

Even if you?re designing for professional programmers,
in the end your programming language is basically
a user-interface design. You will get much better
results regardless of what you?re trying to do if you
think of it as a user-interface design.

Curt
30 Answers

Petite Abeille

2/10/2005 6:25:00 PM

0


On Feb 10, 2005, at 19:17, Curt Hibbs wrote:

> ACM Queue just published an interview with Alan Kay (the creator of
> Smalltalk)

Steve Wart about "why Smalltalk never caught on":

http://hoho.dyndns.org/~holger/smal...

Cheers

--
PA, Onnay Equitursay
http://alt.text...

Douglas Livingstone

2/10/2005 7:46:00 PM

0

> Steve Wart about "why Smalltalk never caught on":

HTML 3.2? Not seen that in a while... I think it needs updated:
Replace Smalltalk with Java, and Java with Ruby :-)

Douglas

Brian McCallister

2/10/2005 8:18:00 PM

0

For the OS X'ers:

curl http://hoho.dyndns.org/~holger/smal... | ruby -pe 'gsub!(/Smalltalk/, "Ruby")' > foo.html && open foo.html && sleep 3 && rm foo.html

For the FreeBSD'ers and Linux'ers:

curl http://hoho.dyndns.org/~holger/smal... | ruby -pe 'gsub!(/Smalltalk/, "Ruby")' > foo.html && mozilla foo.html & && sleep 3 && rm foo.html

Windows folks are on your own, sorry =/

-Brian

On Feb 10, 2005, at 1:17 PM, Curt Hibbs wrote:

> ACM Queue just published an interview with Alan Kay (the creator of
> Smalltalk), and there was one quote from the interview that I really
> liked
> because I think that this is the approach that Matz took with Ruby:
>
> Even if you?re designing for professional programmers,
> in the end your programming language is basically
> a user-interface design. You will get much better
> results regardless of what you?re trying to do if you
> think of it as a user-interface design.
>
> Curt
>
>
>

Adriano Ferreira

2/11/2005 11:42:00 AM

0

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 04:45:44 +0900, Douglas Livingstone
<rampant@gmail.com> wrote:
> HTML 3.2? Not seen that in a while... I think it needs updated:
> Replace Smalltalk with Java, and Java with Ruby :-)

Argh! Going from Smalltalk to Java is not an improvement at all.
Java's benefit compared to conventional languages like C/C++ is
automatic memory management and straight-jacket ways to do a bit of
dynamic programming (like loading classes at runtime, etc.) (and even
that not without pains).

Going from Smalltalk to Java and then to Ruby only works if you intend
to deliver great pain and misery and suddenly smooth their suffering.
I think it is a masochist strategy which I don't deserve to anyone.

Thomas Kirchner

2/11/2005 1:10:00 PM

0

* On Feb 11 20:42, Adriano Ferreira (ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org) wrote:
> Argh! Going from Smalltalk to Java is not an improvement at all.
> Java's benefit compared to conventional languages like C/C++ is
> automatic memory management and straight-jacket ways to do a bit of
> dynamic programming (like loading classes at runtime, etc.) (and even
> that not without pains).
>
> Going from Smalltalk to Java and then to Ruby only works if you intend
> to deliver great pain and misery and suddenly smooth their suffering.
> I think it is a masochist strategy which I don't deserve to anyone.

I think you may have misunderstood the message - he wasn't advocating that
Smalltalk users learn Java then switch to Ruby. He was saying that the
website is now out-of-date because even Java may be falling out of
fashion. In the text of the page, "Smalltalk" should be replaced with
"Java", and "Java" with "Ruby". It might then be more accurate to today's
programming trends :)
Tom

Dave Burt

2/11/2005 1:29:00 PM

0

"Brian McCallister" <brianm@apache.org> wrote in message
news:43dc84d7370b2217664309ef2724deaa@apache.org...
> For the OS X'ers:
>
> curl http://hoho.dyndns.org/~holger/smal... > | ruby -pe 'gsub!(/Smalltalk/, "Ruby")' > > foo.html && open foo.html > && sleep 3 > && rm foo.html
>
> For the FreeBSD'ers and Linux'ers:
>
> curl http://hoho.dyndns.org/~holger/smal... > | ruby -pe 'gsub!(/Smalltalk/, "Ruby")' > > foo.html && mozilla foo.html & > && sleep 3 > && rm foo.html
>
> Windows folks are on your own, sorry =/

For the Windows folk:

ruby -ropen-uri -e "puts open(
'http://hoho.dyndns.org/~holger/smal...').read.gsub(/Smalltalk/,
'Ruby')" > foo.html && start foo.html
&& ruby -e "sleep 3"
&& del foo.html

And all that needs to be one line.

Does anyone know if Windows has a line continuation thingy like *nix's
backslash (\)?

Cheers,
Dave


Douglas Livingstone

2/11/2005 1:38:00 PM

0

> Tom

Thanks Tom, that's the meaning I was after :)

(Any feedback as to why I didn't make sense appreciated!)

Douglas

Park Heesob

2/11/2005 2:50:00 PM

0

Hi,
>
> For the Windows folk:
>
> ruby -ropen-uri -e "puts open(
> 'http://hoho.dyndns.org/~holger/smalltalk...).read.gsub(/Smalltalk/,
> 'Ruby')" > foo.html && start foo.html
> && ruby -e "sleep 3"
> && del foo.html
>
> And all that needs to be one line.
>
> Does anyone know if Windows has a line continuation thingy like *nix's
> backslash (\)?
>
You can put a caret ^ character at the end of the line to continue it.


However, be sure there are no space characters or any other whitespace
following the ^ character.
Try:

ruby -ropen-uri -e "url='http://hoho.dyndns.org/~holger/smalltalk..." ^
-e "puts open(url).read.gsub(/Smalltalk/,'Ruby')" > foo.html ^
&& start foo.html && ruby -e "sleep 3" && del foo.html

Regards,
Park Heesob

Adriano Ferreira

2/11/2005 7:05:00 PM

0

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 22:38:00 +0900, Douglas Livingstone
<rampant@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Tom, that's the meaning I was after :)
> (Any feedback as to why I didn't make sense appreciated!)

Sorry, Douglas, for misinterpreting what you have said. It just didn't
catch my mind your analogy between Smalltalk in the past and Java
today. I think the relation between Smalltalk to Ruby in the past is
not similar to the one Java has to Ruby in present days.

Smalltalk seems to me that it never caught up really, because the
developer base kept relatively small and many people find the
Smalltalk way hard (maybe because it is radical and many like the
well-known). It is a cult language, just like Lisp, I think. But
Java, everybody programs Java, and that does not mean nothing about
the code quality.

[In fact, Ruby inheritance has much to do with Smalltalk - the whole
history of iterators and other features. Without offense, one can say
that Ruby is Smalltalk made right (or at least one way to make it
right).]

In my own experience, Java makes me suffer. So many struggle with
getting types right, so hard to get real reusable code (in the sense
that making code more generic usually implies more changes than one
would expect), it is hard for me to be productive with it. Smalltalk
is more like Ruby in not getting in your way as you experiment. I
guess that Smalltalk programmers are happier as Ruby programmers at
the end of the day than Java developers.

Regards,
Adriano.

Curt Hibbs

2/11/2005 7:43:00 PM

0

Adriano Ferreira wrote:
>
> On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 22:38:00 +0900, Douglas Livingstone
> <rampant@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks Tom, that's the meaning I was after :)
> > (Any feedback as to why I didn't make sense appreciated!)
>
> Sorry, Douglas, for misinterpreting what you have said. It just didn't
> catch my mind your analogy between Smalltalk in the past and Java
> today. I think the relation between Smalltalk to Ruby in the past is
> not similar to the one Java has to Ruby in present days.
>
> Smalltalk seems to me that it never caught up really, because the
> developer base kept relatively small and many people find the
> Smalltalk way hard (maybe because it is radical and many like the
> well-known). It is a cult language, just like Lisp, I think. But
> Java, everybody programs Java, and that does not mean nothing about
> the code quality.

I think this is part of the reason, but I think there is another reason for
the failure of smalltalk that is just as important: The use of an "image"
instead of files. This kept smalltalk in a closed world that did not play
well the outside world.

Curt