On Fri, Apr 08, 2011 at 12:51:35AM +0900, Everett L Williams II wrote:
definition short of the sort of mental gymnastics necessary to discuss
4GLs with a straight face.
*Somebody earlier suggested listening to Robert Martin’s address to the
RailsConf, and I did. It speaks to what can destroy a language, and it
pretty much delineates the types of attitudes that are being brought
forward here. Excel is being denigrated here, and that is foolish. Many
people use spreadsheets all day long to accomplish their work. They are
good with spreadsheets and comfortable with them.
You clearly didn’t read a word I said.
I haven’t listened to Martin’s address (yet), but something tells me he
was not talking about the idea that pointing out some tools are better
for certain jobs than others as an attitude that can destroy a language.
I’m pretty sure he never said that calling something what it is – a
spreadsheet application, as opposed to a language – is in any way toxic
to a community. Maybe we should start calling Ruby a DBMS, and
PostgreSQL a spreadsheet, too. Would that make you happier? Of course,
then we’ll no longer have any names for different types of tools that
carry any meaning, because the names will all be interchangeable.
What is being said here is that they should throw away all that
goodness and go to Ruby or something like Ruby, because it is better
for some classes of problems.
What is being said is that for some classes of problems Ruby is a better
choice – and, in fact, for some classes of problems Excel is no choice
at all. For other classes of problems, Ruby is no choice at all.
Why do I think you’d dispute the notion that people should use Ruby for
all spreadsheet tasks, even if you get up in arms if someone disputes
the
notion that Excel should be used for all programming tasks?
That’s a little like taking a jackhammer out to get rid of the spots on
your garage floor. Since most of these people will never need to
program something that they cannot do in Excel, even if awkwardly, that
seems foolish.
Where are you getting the crazy idea that anyone said everybody who uses
Excel should stop using it for anything at all, and use Ruby instead?
Your straw men are looking pretty shabby.
you sufficiently that you must go to a new tool, or if you need an
excellent tool for future work, something like Ruby makes all the sense
in the world, but every advocate of something like Ruby should realize
that Ruby is not an endpoint.
I don’t think anyone said otherwise. You’re responding to points nobody
made.
In the fairly near future, we are going to progress to machines that
never turn off and never reboot, and that do not distinguish
applications. Ruby nor any other current language is equipped to deal
with that type of environment.
I think a lot of people would disagree with that remark. In fact, Alan
Kay once likened turning off a computer, ending a process, et cetera, to
metaphorical murder (I’m pretty sure it was Kay, anyway – someone
correct me if I misremember). The idea was thata lot is invested in
each
set of running state, and throwing all that away just to restart it
again
later was a criminal waste of resources. Continuity can offer
substantial rewards to not only resource usage, but also the development
of more productive computational models. Object oriented programming
offered the beginnings of a solution to that problem, where objects are
effectively perpetual until one of them is truly, utterly unneeded
thereafter, and the ephemeral needs of the system are served by message
passing instead of by creating, manipulating, and destroying collections
of operational state.
This, to me, sounds like Ruby may be on the right track toward serving
exactly the sorts of needs you imply here – far better than any
spreadsheet application, at least.
Things like genetic programming and fuzzy logic and really, machines
that “think” like we do are the goal. Now I realize that eyes are
rolling and so forth, but what I am trying to say is that Ruby is not
nor will it be in that world, and that future is coming far faster than
most imagine.
Ruby in its current form . . . maybe not. It’s a step in that
direction,
though. What do you have against Ruby that you want to throw it away
before it has given birth to all the more-advanced children it has the
genetic material to spawn? What does this have to do with the laughable
idea that MS Excel is a language? Oh, sure, Excel is surely the world’s
most popular end-user spreadsheet application, and for a number of good
reasons, but that doesn’t mean you get to start calling it a language,
an
operating system, or a microwave oven without people giving you funny
looks.
If you get your nose so stuck down to the grindstone that all you can
see is Ruby, then you will eventually suffer the same criticism as is
being thrown at the guy who is using Excel at the moment. Working like
the devil to make Ruby better, and to make it more accessible, are
worthy expenditures of energy. Being offensively defensive about it and
parsing definitions about what is and is not a programming language are
complete wastes of time, and are self defeating.
-
I’m looking at lots of things – not just Ruby.
-
I’ll probably be using something else more than Ruby in three years
(Go, maybe?).
-
There’s nothing offensive about pointing out that MS Excel is not a
“language” any more than there is in pointing out that my laptop is not
a
cloud storage service, nor about pointing out that Excel is a better
spreadsheet application than Ruby but a worse general purpose
programming
tool.
-
If we do not differentiate between different types of tools
(programming languages vs. spreadsheets), we will suffer for our
inability to discuss our tools meaningfully.
At the moment, Ruby is not threatening to displace even COBOL and
ForTran, much less C/C++ and Assembler, and there are hosts of simple
tasks that really should not be done in Ruby or anything but a 4GL, you
know, that target of a derisive earlier comment.
I don’t disagree with any of that. There are many tasks for which I
would never use Ruby. That doesn’t mean that something that has no
systemic grammar a “language”, though – even if that thing is better
for
certain tasks than something that is a language, like Ruby. I
wouldn’t
use a language to hit a baseball, after all, but that doesn’t make a
baseball bat a “language”.
The thing that makes 4GLs most laughable is the idea that they’re
“fourth
generation”. Think for the moment about what “generation” means.
Someone really jumped the gun assigning the term “fourth generation
language” to what amounts to GUI wrappers for macro languages, probably
assuming that somehow the approach taken to designing these things would
ultimately lead to the ability to write operating system code without
having to know anything about operating systems some day.
which I don’t have schemas, aren’t.
I’m not really sure what you’re trying to say about what is and isn’t
possible in Ruby with the end of that last sentence, and I don’t know
what the fact you found a 4GL very useful within its narrow domain of
intended applicability proves that might be contrary to anything I said.
