Re: Why Ruby is popular?

Apart from being interesting to the WO vs Ruby debate, perhaps this is the factor that Objective-C has, although as is evident in the Wikipedia article, a language can be strongly typed to support this concept. Well, whatever makes programming more powerful (less verbose), yet easier at the same time......

On 28/08/2006, at 4:10 PM, Ian Joyner wrote:

Quite a bit of talk about Ruby, but I couldn't work out which message to follow up, so here is a new thread.

According to Martin Fowler:

Closures have been around for a long time. I ran into them properly for the first time in Smalltalk where they're called Blocks. Lisp uses them heavily. They're also present in the Ruby scripting language - and are a major reason why many rubyists like using Ruby for scripting.

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/Closure.html

An interesting article.

So we are finally catching up to ALGOL-60 (implemented by Burroughs as its systems programming language in 1962, and Don Knuth before that) with call-by-name parameters (aka thunks implemented by the NAMC and VALC machine instructions, with tagged OO architecture). No wonder C.A.R Hoare said Algol was a considerable improvement over most of its successors!

Ian

_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Webobjects-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/email@hidden

This email sent to email@hidden

References:
	>Why Ruby is popular? (From: Ian Joyner <email@hidden>)