E
Eleanor McHugh
Hi --
At the same time, though, I'd say that object orientation per se
doesn't depend on polymorphism and inheritance. To me it's the
convergence back onto the sending-msgs-to-objects paradigm that's at
the heart of it (though I don't put that forth as a CS-ly correct
characterization, just my sense of it).
I like to think of Ruby as being the English of programming languages.
It's got a large and flexible vocabulary that makes it very powerful
to work with, but unlike Perl or Lisp or C it's also a very easy
language to get to grips with.
I'm particularly keen on the loose and pragmatic approach to OO. Being
able to open classes and objects at will makes it very easy to
specialise them for a specific project. And as for inheritance
hierarchies, there's much less pressure to build these rigid and
gargantuan frameworks than in certain mainstream languages.
As for the functional aspect, I tend to even forget I'm using a
functional style because message sending is so pervasive that chaining
higher-order functions is the obvious way to solve many problems.
Oh, and best of all Ruby's fun to code in
Ellie
Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net