On 4/22/06, Tim Dysinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It's curious that the Java, C# and Ruby (w/ Rails) camps are like the > French, English and Natives in the new America. It's all OO > programming right? >
Well, yes and no. There are other axis of measurement than OO; dynamicity for example. Ruby is much more dynamic than the other two. You can do things like add methods to an instance at runtime. Ruby's dynamicity makes metaprogramming quite easy and as such you run into it even in the standard libraries. Ruby also has closures (though I hear C# is getting them). And Ruby is strongly-dynamically typed as opposed to being statically typed as Java is. With Ruby lots of interesting things can happen at runtime that aren't possible in more static languages. To use a sculpting metaphore: think of Ruby as modelling clay and languages like Java, C++, C# as marble. (caveat: I haven't done much Java. I came more from a C++/Perl background) Phil _______________________________________________ PDXRuby mailing list [email protected] IRC: #pdx.rb on irc.freenode.net http://lists.pdxruby.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxruby
