Zed Shaw - Ruby has dodged a bullet

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

APL, for example, probably would never have taken off if Kenneth
Iverson had invented it in a university instead of at IBM.

APL took off like the Spuce Goose.
[http://www.sprucegoose.org/aircraft_artifacts/exhibits.html]

There was a time in the late 1960s -- mid 1970s when you couldn't walk
into an econometrics shop without knowing APL. I don't think it ever
found any other practical niches, but it was very big there. The current
open dialect, Aplus-fsf, was in fact cut loose from Morgan Stanley.

I would have *loved* to learn APL in its heyday. I was actually at IBM
(Poughkeepsie, NY) when it was developed, and met Ken Iverson. He and
Aden Falkoff were promoting the language within the IBM laboratories.
But the team I was on had severe performance constraints and we wrote
everything in assembler.

After I left IBM, there was never an opportunity for me to learn and use
it, and by the time personal computers showed up that could run APL, I
had discovered Forth.

 

[Robert Dober]

After I left IBM, there was never an opportunity for me to learn and use
it, and by the time personal computers showed up that could run APL, I
had discovered Forth.

It is good to go forth in life (but some smalltalking does not heart either) .
Robert

 

[Rick DeNatale]

It is good to go forth in life (but some smalltalking does not heart either) .

Oh my God! APL is STILL encouraging one-liners! <G>

 

[Bob Hutchison]

Oh my God! APL is STILL encouraging one-liners! <G>

Ohhhh well done!

Cheers,
Bob

 

[Nicholas Wieland]

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

Il giorno 02/gen/08, alle ore 18:11, Michael Schuerig ha scritto:

So what *is* wrong with the Rails community? I take it, that behavior
like Zed's or your own, whatever it may be, can't be it. There are
annoyances, of course, people asking questions and demanding answers
("bump") without doing the slightest research beforehand. Well, that's
easily ignored, the worst about it is the traffic it generates. Are
Rails people unpleasant in the real world? Honestly, I don't meet that
many to judge the case. If anyone of those I did meet was unpleasant,
it was entirely unrelated to Rails or Ruby.

+1
I work professionally with Ruby and Rails, that's why I will never
thank Rails enough - I studied Ruby _years_ before Rails, I never had
the possibility to work with it, not even close (biggest problem can
be that I'm italian ...).
From time to time I find myself asking something on IRC, and have
some silly "I know everything get a clue" answers, but what the hell,
who cares. I passed my 18 and I can just ignore harsh comments -
especially if they're from someone I don't care of.
There will always be strong personalities (I can name some in the
Python community for example) and silly people, but definitely not
because of the language or the framework or whatever.
I can't really say something about Zed, he literally saved my ass at
an italian conference, and saved twice because of Mongrel, plus even
if he goes in Hyde mode on his blog he is a nice guy and I'm sure
that everybody who actually met him can tell the same - but you can't
say all that he says and in the same time doing exactly the same
thing just 3 times worse.
Anyway, there is of course some convergence to Rails from PHP, and of
course some kind of "skill clash", PHP is basically a structural
language, and being Rails pretty easy to learn people just don't
learn Ruby before: I just rewrote a Rails app written by PHP
programmers, and my god, it redefined the meaning of the word "hell".
Still I don't fell like it's a Rails fault, if people writes shitty
code it's people fault, not of the framework.

My 0,2
ngw