perspective on ruby

[Edward Elliott]

RK wrote:
> I just don't get it.  The scripted object-oriented clean programming
> language is done.

Nothing's ever done except LISP.  There's always room for experimentation 
and improvement.

> I'm more than willing to supprt RoR if it's being sold as the popular
> alternative to .NET programming,  which it is in some CS curriculum
> (where Java being thrown out).

Switching to Java for CS was a tremendous blunder.  Students need to 
understand low-level resource management.  They need to learn to think in 
more than 1 programming paradigm that shoehorns everything into objects 
(ok, java has generics now. if you squint really hard. sort of).  One 
course in C++ doesn't cut it, the curriculum should either use different 
languages fitted to each task or emphasize a single language with broad 
abilities (picking the best programming model for each task).  Java is 
piss-poor for most undergraduate classes (I've taught several).  C++ isn't 
perfect but it is pretty good, warts and all (some warts make good learning 
experiences).

Note that I'm talking about teaching languages.  Outside the classroom my 
choices would be completely different.

Sorry, I don't know anything about Ruby on Rails. :)  The fact that even 
numeric literals are objects make me suspicious of Ruby as a 
general-purpose language though.