reesesWeb

Challenge by Moss on September 13, 4:25

It's interesting--I've thought for a while that it would be cool for Ruby to steal some of Lisp's more advanced features. Ruby has a way of taking esoteric computer science techniques and making them deliciously readable and easy to use, so I'd love to see a Rubyish implementation of, say, macros. But I never could have guessed that we'd come so far so quickly in implementing the most important Lisp feature of all: violently defensive community resistance to even the mildest criticism! Now that's innovation!

(Yes, I'm aware the macros comment is very naive, that's not the point.)

This was a comment made regarding a post made on DHH's blog. All the usual things pertain - people confuse Ruby being such a nice language to use that they invest a lot of time in it, and ergo, since they've made such an investment, it's very good and you should criticize it. (Amiga?) DHH is particularly notable in this field because he uses his admittedly impressive success in one area (Rails) to opine on a lot of other areas (programming scalable systems, operations, etc.) where he clearly has no idea what he's talking about. Everybody does it to some extent, so much so that it has a cute little latin name, argumentum ad verecundiam.

I don't have any other color to add to the conversation, I just wanted to preserve the comment, as it made me laugh out loud when I hit the punchline.

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