On 10/3/06, Carl Tollander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> What you mean by fluidity's got me somewhat baffled, at
> least for language
> comparisons. Could you say more?
the fluidity is partly the syntax and partly the interactive
interpreter. (lots of languages have those. unfortunately not Java.)
so you know how Strings in Java are immutable? well, I had to split a
string today.
initially all I remembered was the split() function. I figured it
probably ran on spaces. so I go into irb:
"muppet asdf".split
and I get
["muppet", "asdf"]
which is an array. arrays can be indexed by a standard [] array
indexing notation, so I try:
"muppet asdf".split[1]
and it works. I get
"asdf"
so then I do this in the real code:
@thing = Thing.find_by_name(params[:search].split[1])
and it works, but it gives the wrong results, because I forgot, I
didn't need to split on white space, I needed to split on a colon. so
then I go back into irb and emerge two seconds later with the answer:
@thing = Thing.find_by_name(params[:search].split(":")[1])
which was actually the first thing I thought of. that's what's really
fun about it, often the first thing you think of works. part of it is
just that working in a scripting language with an interactive
interpreter flows really easy because there isn't any pausing. Java
clobbers Ruby in performance but Ruby can be more fun.
> >(And learn Haskell and OCaml.)
>
> Haskell looks interesting, but the community's relatively small. Any
> suggestions for best
> way to go about learning it? What would we *use* it for? Might be fun
> in any case.
Well, I'm not sure. It hadn't occurred to me that it might be useful
for something. That's a good question.
> As for OCaml, Lisp and playing with type theories, this might be amusing:
> http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2006/08/categorifying_cccs_seeing_comp.html
> and yes, that's a MathML-enabled blog.
I can't really read math.
--
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org
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