Yukihiro M. wrote:
I grow up, the problem domain I am in charge become far more complex
than BASIC can handle. That’s why I need Ruby.
Here’s my list:
- OCaml
- Mathematica
F# is also fun but it is newer than Ruby.
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
were fun before |there was Ruby?"
by then I had extensive FORTRAN and macro assembler experience and was
fooling around with Lisp 1.5. I simply can’t imagine the people who
bought Altairs and spent hours reading Microsoft BASIC into the 8K of
RAM from an ASR 33.
I have used Business Basic (a superset of Basic) professionally for over
20 years and like a lot of things about it. I love having screen and
file handling built into the language. It makes it very easy to write
programs, no having to worry about requiring files or linking. And
debugging is even easier as I can stop a program at any point see what
is going on, fix it, and continue. I started with Fortran on IBM and
CDC mainframes but the language needed a lot of help to be user friendly
or debugging. I spent over a week debugging a Fortran program that
baffled even the heads of the computer department before finding out my
problem was that I requested too much memory!
On 1/3/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:
I’ve never written any Smalltalk, so I can’t comment there, but I have
to admit, as much as I enjoy programming in general, the two languages
that have been the most fun over the years have been Lisp (1.5 actually
– I don’t really enjoy Common Lisp all that much) and Forth.The key to fun in that article, or at least one of them, seems to be the
rapid feedback that one can get with some languages.
You got that right, again 
Imagine where we have come from, feeding Pascal Programs into a card
reader
and searching a printout the next day.
To changing a method in our Smalltalk GUI while the application is
running
(and the concept was born before I fed punch cards into a Cyber
mainframe
on university).
That is basically (pun intended) why I had lots of fun with Basic on the
Sharp1500 in the early 80s.
I could experiment with an iterative Quicksort implementing the stack of
local variables and return addresses myself. I thought in Pascal and
implemented in Basic that was about one of the most revealing
programming
experiences I ever had. BTW after the Quicksort program was finished
there
were 10 data cells left to be sorted LOL.
Ruby matches these feelings and I hope Smalltalk will too.
Certainly a Lisp or
Scheme REPL environment or Forth’s equivalent, the “outer interpreter”
and “colon compiler”, give that kind of rapid feedback. And Ruby has
irb, although there isn’t really an “IDE” with irb at the core, at least
none that I’m aware of. In Forth, we used to call this process DATK –
Design At The Keyboard.
Exactly what I meant above.
–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.Cheers
Robert
–
“The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution
hasn’t started yet. Don’t be misled by the enormous flow of money into
bad
defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of
incomplete ideas.”
- Alan Kay
BASIC was fun for me, when I was in junior high. The point is that as
I grow up, the problem domain I am in charge become far more complex
than BASIC can handle. That’s why I need Ruby.BASIC was never fun for me. I was in grad school when it came out, and
by then I had extensive FORTRAN and macro assembler experience and was
fooling around with Lisp 1.5. I simply can’t imagine the people who
bought Altairs and spent hours reading Microsoft BASIC into the 8K of
RAM from an ASR 33.
Basic was loads of fun for me, I learnt it when I was 10 or 11 on a
TRS-80. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
I’m playing with Smalltalk, it’s fun.
Devin M. wrote:
Charles Oliver N. wrote:
The motivations for JRuby go well beyond those for a SmallRuby,
largely because not only could it potentially be a “better Ruby” in
some ways, but it would be a Ruby that could leverage the entire Java
platform, now GPL and freely available. So there’s two ways to think
about JRuby: as an alternative implementation of Ruby and as an
alternative language for the Java platform.
But you just told him not to think of the second, a paragraph earlier!
Sure, there are valid motivations for JRuby (duh), but does your
motivation inequality apply equally to M. Dober, professed Java-disliker?
JRuby will be both a floor wax AND a dessert topping.
I think what the smalltalkers are arguing is that it’d be much easier to
leverage those fun things in a Ruby-Smalltalk implementation, because
the two languages have much more in common than do Ruby and Java. Mind
you, I’m relatively clueless in all things language-implementation, so
consider me a messenger. Well, a curious messenger.
Then I encourage them by all means to make such things happen. Except
that they aren’t, and they haven’t. Actions speak louder than words, and
unfortunately smalltalkers seem to talk big (yuk yuk) but produce
little.
If a Ruby implementation on a Smalltalk VM is so easy, where is it? 
On 1/4/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:
Mathematica is definitely fun, but expensive fun. Axiom is as much fun
and is open source.
Octave is fun and free too 
My other vote would be for Brainf*ck… good masochistic fun.
On 1/4/07, Charles Oliver N. [email protected] wrote:
Sure, there are valid motivations for JRuby (duh), but does your
Then I encourage them by all means to make such things happen. Except
that they aren’t, and they haven’t. Actions speak louder than words, and
unfortunately smalltalkers seem to talk big (yuk yuk) but produce little.
I talk much and produce little not the Smalltalkers. This is after all a
Ruby List.
I did not take offence because I know best for myself that I am not up
to a
task like yours but I still have the feeling that Smalltalk has its time
ahead.
If a Ruby implementation on a Smalltalk VM is so easy, where is it?
Ok I will do it, alpha is planned for 2042, sigghhhh!
Robert
–
Charles Oliver N., JRuby Core Developer
Blogging on Ruby and Java @ headius.blogspot.com
Help spec out Ruby today! @ www.headius.com/rubyspec
[email protected] – [email protected]
–
“The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution
hasn’t started yet. Don’t be misled by the enormous flow of money into
bad
defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of
incomplete ideas.”
- Alan Kay
On 3-Jan-07, at 8:49 PM, Yukihiro M. wrote:
before
|there was Ruby?"BASIC was fun for me, when I was in junior high. The point is that as
I grow up, the problem domain I am in charge become far more complex
than BASIC can handle. That’s why I need Ruby.
Smalltalk has always been fun for me (first environment I actually
played with extensively); but in the last couple of years, Io has
been a little more fun.
Giles B. wrote:
Basic was loads of fun for me, I learnt it when I was 10 or 11 on a
TRS-80. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.I’m playing with Smalltalk, it’s fun.
Ah, but the TRS-80 had a built in cassette I/O and video interface –
you didn’t need a clunky old (and large and expensive) ASR 33 to use it!
And wasn’t BASIC in the ROM on a TRS-80? The first Altairs didn’t have
any of that. And it wasn’t much longer before there were floppy disks
and “operating systems”.
Yeah, Smalltalk would be fun if I had learned it a couple of decades
ago. But I went down the Forth path then and the Ruby path now.
Smalltalk seems like a distraction now. I’m actually looking at Ada
again – I just saw some info about Ada 2005 go by on another mailing
list. Can Ada be fun? Should Ada be fun?
–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.
On 1/4/07, Gregory B. [email protected] wrote:
On 1/4/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:
Mathematica is definitely fun, but expensive fun. Axiom is as much fun
and is open source.Octave is fun and free too
My other vote would be for Brainf*ck… good masochistic fun.
Zed introduced me to this the other day, and it looks like a good time:
http://factorcode.org/
On 1/4/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:
Gregory B. wrote:
On 1/4/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:
Mathematica is definitely fun, but expensive fun. Axiom is as much fun
and is open source.Octave is fun and free too
Octave is sorta kinda a free Matlab clone. And R is sorta kinda a free
S-Plus clone.
Octave is a pretty good clone of Matlab, too. For at least my needs.
I had no trouble getting through a linear algebra course which
required matlab using it.
Gregory B. wrote:
On 1/4/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:
Mathematica is definitely fun, but expensive fun. Axiom is as much fun
and is open source.Octave is fun and free too
Octave is sorta kinda a free Matlab clone. And R is sorta kinda a free
S-Plus clone.My other vote would be for Brainfck… good masochistic fun.
I woldn’t to*ch that with a 10 foot pole!
–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.
Wilson B. wrote:
Zed introduced me to this the other day, and it looks like a good time:
http://factorcode.org/
Yeah , I just ran into that the other day too, following some trail of
breadcrumbs on http://del.icio.us/znmeb concerning Forth. Zed has pretty
good taste in languages – I hope that Factor doesn’t distract him from
the wonderful Ruby work he’s up to.
–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.