I'm notoriously incorrect when I make projections, but I think I may add another category named after a programming language. For a few months now I have been reading about and playing with some Ruby programs.
Ruby is an object oriented scripting language, created in 1995 by Yukihiro Matsumoto. There are a quite a few technical reasons a programmer might want to use Ruby; one of which is the Rails web application framework. Ruby on Rails is what first brought Ruby to my attention. This week my attention has been pretty squarely focused on reading an on-line programming manual. Don't get me wrong, I generally don't like programming manuals and technical reading in general. And I usually don't read the manuals unless all else fails.
When I first learned Perl, I was taken by the use of the word "doohickey" in the footnote on the first page of the first chapter of the Camel Book. Clearly this was something different than the programming I had learned before this. And something about this quote from the overview just made sense to me:
Languages were first invented by humans, for the benefit of humans. In the annals of computer science, this fact has occasionally been forgotten.[2] Since Perl was designed (loosely speaking) by an occasional linguist, it was designed to work smoothly in the same ways that natural language works smoothly. Naturally, there are many aspects to this, since natural language works well at many levels simultaneously. We could enumerate many of these linguistic principles here, but the most important principle of language design is that easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible. (Actually, that's two principles.) They may seem obvious to you, but many computer languages fail at one or the other.
I have written a lot of little Perl scripts since then, and even a couple of web applications. Perl got OO along the way. Perl was "different" in a lot of ways then, in the same way that Ruby is different now. What has held my attention on Ruby this week is Why.
