How Come Ruby is Text-Oriented?

Ruby
41

All in the eye of the beholder, eh?

I dont think this holds true. Sure, it may hold true in the context of
the given example, but I personally think that there are multiple ways
for a human to interface with computers in a “creative” fashion (in the
sense as to create a program).

The smalltalk approach is really cool, and I think really visual
programming is far from its peak - however at the same time I never felt
that smalltalk reached its full potential. Seriously, I believe aside
from some hyping I always felt that “scripting languages” have had a
much more profound effect in programming. Or even haskell. Text stays
simple, and smalltalk has never struck me as a very elegant language
where something like squeak would give you a 1000x increase in
productivity.

As far as UIs are concerned, I actually think that the smarter the UI
the better. This is why I believe the “commandline” will one day fail -
like the day when we have really awesome hardware AND software. Nobody
inspired by science fiction movies?

42

On Thursday 06 August 2009 04:11:58 am Marc H. wrote:

As far as UIs are concerned, I actually think that the smarter the UI
the better.

I couldn’t disagree more.

You could say “the easier the UI the better”, but when UIs start getting
“smart”, they inevitably lose precision. The dumber the UI the better.

An example of a better, simpler UI might be automatic transmission –
nobody
really cares what gear you’re in, you care how fast you’re going, and
how fast
you’re accelerating.

An example of a smarter, but really worse UI might be if you removed the
steering wheel and put in a voice-activated, GPS-guided system. Ok,
great,
until you say “Go to Chili’s” and it hears “Go to Chilie”, and starts
driving
to South America. A dumber interface is better – if the GPS steers you
wrong,
at least you’re still the one who’s actually holding the steering wheel.

This is why I believe the “commandline” will one day fail -
like the day when we have really awesome hardware AND software.

We do now, and the commandline hasn’t failed.

One of the main reasons for that is that it’s so much more powerful than
any
GUI that’s been developed, in a few ways. One example: Unix pipes.
Through
this simple mechanism, I can join programs together in ways they weren’t
designed to – the traditional example is tar and compress. Not only
does this
mean that tar doesn’t have to know about compression (though modern
versions
usually do), it also means it’s trivial to swap one compression
algorithm for
another – I can just use ‘tar | bzip2’ instead of ‘tar | gzip’.

GUIs just haven’t reached anywhere near even that simple power –
another
obvious example is piping the output of anything through grep. Wouldn’t
it be
nice if all GUIs supported searching? In practice, many do, but each app
has
to implement it separately, and each search works a little differently.
Contrast this to having one program that does one thing, and does it
well
(grep) which can be swapped for any other search program at any point.

Now, it may get to where the commandline is a lost art, but I just don’t
see
it being replaced, unless you’ve managed to come up with a GUI that can
do the
same things – and, more importantly, do them at least as fast.

43

On 2009-08-05, Fabian S. [email protected] wrote:

Seems to me, you’re using the wrong window manager :slight_smile:

On OS X and Windows, I use what comes out of the box. Admittedly, on OS
X, I’ve installed a whole bunch of stuff to make it so I don’t have to
mouse much (Vimperator, Google QSB, and a plugin so I can resize and
move windows around using keyboard shortcuts). I mostly use my Linux box
only by SSHing in from my OS X machine. I’ve got GNOME on there by
default. I’ve tried wmii, awesome and a few other minimalist,
keyboard-oriented WMs and they often require a lot of effort, or various
applications just break in jarring ways. My fanaticism for
keyboard-driven computing is only exceeded by my laziness.

44

On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 11:48 PM, Luc H.[email protected] wrote:

fucktards are the ones who decide what goes in the French dictionary or not
they actually have to be forced by the overwhelming popular usage first,
which takes time. That’s why :slight_smile:
I do not agree, the French have much more of a defense mechanisme (
but you see I pollute the English with French words, something which
has happened for a long time period anyway) than any other language
community I have met before (that is three, German, Italian and
Spanish). Know you might think bad of the Académie Française, I and
most people I know of my age do not. I just recently complained to a
much younger colleague that I never knew how to pronounce email in
French (or club, or rugby or Burt Lancester) and he simply pointed out
that courriel is a beautiful word. I agree.

But I am aware, well aware, that for some folks label all those who
are of a different opinion with nice expressions of which you make
ample use above.

Cheers
Robert

45

effort, or various applications just break in jarring ways. My
occasional java gui freaking out :slight_smile: but you can’t blame the window
manager for that… I found that the comfort, rapidness (is that even
a word?) and accessibility of a tiling window manager outweighs all
it’s problems. I repeatedly find myself hitting Win-3 when working
under Windows, trying to get the window manager to jump to my
Vimperator or Win-S trying to maximize a window…

In Linux I setup 12 workspaces, and switch between them using keys
Ctrl+F1 through Ctrl+F12. Most apps I use have a dedicated and
specific workspace, so I always know what shortcut to press to get
to a specific app. Combined with a dual monitor setup for when I
need to have two apps visible simultaneously to be productive.

46

On OS X and Windows, I use what comes out of the box. Admittedly, on OS
X, I’ve installed a whole bunch of stuff to make it so I don’t have to
mouse much (Vimperator, Google QSB, and a plugin so I can resize and
move windows around using keyboard shortcuts). I mostly use my Linux box
only by SSHing in from my OS X machine. I’ve got GNOME on there by
default. I’ve tried wmii, awesome and a few other minimalist,
keyboard-oriented WMs and they often require a lot of effort, or various
applications just break in jarring ways. My fanaticism for
keyboard-driven computing is only exceeded by my laziness.

Almost the same here. Tiling window managers under windows suck
(especially
when you have to have that ugly windows console open, which refuses to
size
to
any usable proportion). Only I stuck with wmii. I quite like their
philosophy.
Although I’ll have to switch soon, when I get a second monitor, hehe.
Too
bad they
don’t support that…
The apps breaking are minimal on my setup, only the occasional java gui
freaking out :slight_smile:
but you can’t blame the window manager for that…
I found that the comfort, rapidness (is that even a word?) and
accessibility
of a tiling
window manager outweighs all it’s problems. I repeatedly find myself
hitting
Win-3 when
working under Windows, trying to get the window manager to jump to my
Vimperator
or Win-S trying to maximize a window…

Greetz!