Re: ruby

[Dan Weinreb <address@hidden>]

   Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 10:01:54 -0800
   From: Lennon Day-Reynolds <lennon@day-reynolds.com>

   Secondly, and more fundamentally, I find it much harder to get 
   excited about a language that's strictly OO. I fled Java for that 
   very reason -- there are a lot of projects I do which either don't 
   require the extra scaffolding of an OO system, are better written 
   in a functional style, etc. 

Gee, you really abandoned Java for such a small problem?  Is that
honestly your major problem with Java?  Would you feel the same way
about Smalltalk?  Anyway, it has never bothered me.  In the cases
where there really isn't anything OO going on, which in my experience
is usually groups of little utility functions, I just use static
methods, with the class simply serving as a name scoping thing.

I suppose if you often write very little script-like programs,the text
overhead of the "class" statement might seem like a lot of characters
to type; is that the issue?  I guess I don't write programs small
enough for that to be a problem.

I do agree that it's best to have the best of both worlds, which
I think Lisp-with-CLOS gives you.  (I don't know Ruby at all so
I can't comment on it.)