On 29 April 2014 03:48, Sean P. DeNigris <sean@clipperadams.com> wrote:
Esteban A. Maringolo wrote
Plays well with "choose your favorite text editor" (Sublime, Vim, etc.) and IDEs (RubyMine, etc.), with source control systems (any file based system), with unix in general (several cli commands), has binding for any major/mainstream library* (databases, network, etc.).
But again these boil down to community size/interest - To use "your favorite text editor", Craig Latta serves Smalltalk via WebDav [1], but who has jumped at this opportunity? - source control - now that there is community interest, progress on git support has been moving ahead rapidly with minimal resources - unix in general - with FFI and OSProcess, what can't you do? Are we talking about the lack of cool Ruby backtick syntax? While definitely cool, that special-purpose syntax is the kind of cognitive load Smalltalk overcomes. All those little syntactical twists and turns to remember lead away from "syntax on a T-shirt" to manuals with hundreds of pages - bindings - again, obviously just a question of community size and interest
Backtick syntax is largely bogus anyway. It's a minor string interpolation trick with a special evaluation strategy. And I entirely agree that Ruby has (way, WAY) too much syntax.
So the "play well with others" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are no bindings because there are no people to write them because there are no bindings... At inception, Ruby (and every other language) didn't have those bindings either.
That's largely true, in the sense that someone needs to grab a shovel to dig that trench. But if you start out with an external text editor, with an external version control system, with (only) stdout/stderr/stdin, you end up building a different system than if you're already in an insular environment and want/need to learn to "play well with others". Ruby plays well with other - interfaces well with external systems - precisely because it didn't have that integrated environment. Now sure, back in 1976 Smalltalk didn't either, but we're here in 2014, 18 years after Squeak budded off Apple Smalltalk: a tightly integrated environment is what we started from. frank
[1] http://thiscontext.com/2011/06/09/my-favorite-text-editor-editing-a-spoon-we...
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