
Matz on Ruby, Functional Programming and Programming Languages Design - fogus
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/yukihiro-matz-language-design;jsessionid=494D146DB8228801C15BE0905C889EFE
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Raphael_Amiard
> As a language geek, Clojure does not provide a lot of new things

I found it interesting that matz would say that, given how little ruby
innovates in terms of programming concepts.

> I'm a language geek, so I'm not really interested in using it, but I'm
> pretty interested in studying it

That probably means that if Matz stumbled upon ruby, he wouldn't even have
bothered looking at it.

EDIT:

I'll extend on my comment a little. I think both ruby and clojure are language
designed to be used by regular programmers, even if clojure probably aims more
at 'language geeks' as Matz says. So i'd say, whatever his justifications are,
it would have been interesting if Matz looked at both languages in a similar
way.

Also i'd say that for such languages, it's more the way that 'features' are
assembled, and which restrictions are imposed to the programmer, that makes
the language interesting or not, and that if examined under that angle,
clojure takes a bolder step in the direction of interesting IMHO.

EDIT2: I'm not flaming, just expressing my point of view, so if you downvote,
have at least the courtesy of explaining why you disagree.

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tumult
He's not bashing on Clojure, he just states that it does not introduce many
new concepts. And I would agree. Clojure does not really introduce anything
new -- it bundles a bunch of existing stuff together into a more readily
usable, cohesive platform. Clojure is interesting to look at for how it
practically implements things, not how it introduces entirely new concepts.

(to be clear, I'm not saying this out of defense of Ruby, which I don't have
much experience with personally)

~~~
JulianMorrison
I think Clojure "agents" might be new.

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jerf
What specifically about them do you think is new? I don't know Clojure so I
can't judge it, but the idea of "agents" goes back decades, and languages such
as Erlang that have been around for a long time have implemented various
versions fairly well.

Perhaps there is something new, but the space is fairly well covered by
lesser-known-but-usable languages, if unheard of in the mainstream. (I use
that phrase to draw a distinction against purely academic languages;
implementing things there hardly counts.)

~~~
JulianMorrison
Well, message passing actors have their own theory and calculus (based on
particle physics, actually), and there have been "agents" in the form of
interprocess mobile code, but the idea of _pure functions_ as messages and the
recipient (the so called "agent") being just a dynamically typed blob of data
with an associated thread and possible associated watchers - that's new. I
don't think it has a theory, yet.

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joblessjunkie
I love the content on this website; hate the horrible design. Before I
discovered Readability, I always ended up using "View Source" to read the
interviews.

<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

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semmons
Here's a link to interview transcript without all the garbage.
[http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ATkBKEXbo6n8ZGdrNzhoM2dfND...](http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ATkBKEXbo6n8ZGdrNzhoM2dfNDhkanMzaDljaA&hl=en)

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chriseidhof
I would be really interested in what he thinks of Haskell once he has written
a large program in it. I seriously think he would like it even more.

~~~
blasdel
Oh, the parentheses he'll omit!

