Matthew Huntbach takes a long hard look at the coolest language on the planet and is distinctly under impressed by what he sees…
Friday 16 March 2007
by Matthew Huntbach
Tim Sweeney’s talk The Next Mainstream Programming Language (PowerPoint PPT) is in many ways an antidote to the recent Ruby hype. Tim calls for the use of stronger types to ensure program reliability. He praises the academically-developed Haskell functional programming language. He raises concurrency as a feature which must be tackled in the next big programming language, using a better model than the shared state with threads and mutual exclusion devices used by Java - and by Ruby - (...)
"Ruby’s dynamic class modification also strikes me as something with the potential to produce hugely complex and non-understandable code... There isn’t one class definition I can reliably say completely defines an object’s behaviour"
First, even in Java or .NET, you do not always find a class completely defining an object’s behavior in any well OO design. Ever heard of Single Responsibility principle, and separation of concern? How about AOP? Second, open class feature is huge strength of Ruby (ever knowing .NET 3.5 is trying to achieve the similar thing with extension method?), and if you do not happen to appreciate that, pick another language that is more suitable for your need.
