On 2009-10-01 08:53 +0100 (Thu), Andrew Coppin wrote: > Sure. But what is a computer program? It's a *list of instructions* that > tells a computer *how to do something*.
Some are. Some aren't, as proven by the Haskell definition of sum, which is certainly a "program." I like to think of a program as a specification. A list of instructions can certainly qualify, but so can other things, depending on what's interpreting and executing that specification. On 2009-10-01 08:59 +0100 (Thu), Andrew Coppin wrote: > Although, to all the people who ask "why is Ruby so popular?", I might > suggest "because it's easy to learn"... Actually, Ruby isn't terribly easy to learn. If you have previous experience in another imperative or OO language, you'll pick up the parts of Ruby that are similar to that fairly quickly, but you're not really learning anything so much as just doing a simple translation of a few concepts you already know. You're still going to run into problems with a number of standard Ruby constructions, probably not be writing clean or idiomatic code, and you'll be a long way from writing DSLs. In particular, you're likely to be writing highly repetitive code which could easily be refactored into something much smaller and nicer. (I'm constantly seeing people who have programmed in Ruby for years come up with six- to ten-line chunks of code that are could be replaced with a single line if they, e.g., only know that there was such as thing as a "modulo" function.) >From reading a lot of the code out there (particularly disasters such as Rails), I suspect a lot of Ruby programmers don't get much past this level. cjs -- Curt Sampson <c...@starling-software.com> +81 90 7737 2974 Functional programming in all senses of the word: http://www.starling-software.com _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe