X-Warning-for-clue-impaired: Read with tongue firmly in cheek <<//EOJ

  Ruby -- The Pascal of the /200[\d]/s.

Ruby is like Perl, only its proponents don't moon the academics, they
*are* the academics.  So they don't need grants to give up the day job,
the university thinks writing useless languages is good, and the dayjob
is mooning the students.  (If the university thought building Perl was
that good, we wouldn't have to have sprung Damian from /j/a/i/l/
school.)  So I fully expect Ruby-ites (Rubes? Rubicks?) to moon the the
sysadmins.  (Is that what Dr.Dobbs said?  I'd be worried if Dr.Dobbs was
in favor of Perl.) I don't know if Ruby has continuations, but I bet
they do ... and I bet they don't let people implement Ruby who don't
know about 'em.  This begats a Rather self-limiting commmunity. Ruby may
be doomed to be the bastard child of Scheme and Perl, the next hot
pedagogic language that never escapes fromt he laboratory ... except in
rare outbreaks to be cleand up by CDC folks in moonsuits.

//EOJ

All frivolity aside, I just spent a long chat with an old
(semi-academic) friend on Ruby -- he's a testing consultant; he's
writing a Ruby textbook for OO nuts like me. I'd be intersted in hearing
more about Ruby ... as I gather from previous Rube /o/u/t/b/r/e/a/k/s/
[no, I said frivolity aside! Out damn spot!] 
requests, /t/h/e/ /p/a/r/r/o/t/m/a/n/ Dan S. would like to hear from
some Rube too.  Could be interesting.

But whether the Ruby-/b/a/i/t/i/n/g/exchange meeting should be the
Boston.PM meeting or another /n/e/u/t/r/a/l/ venue, I dunno. I think
there's more than enough swiss-camel-attachments to hear about, if
someone will step forward.  My stuff's not ready yet ... need to
disassemble & reassemble it first, it's UGLY ...

 -- Bill

X-Warning-A-Moose-Once-Bit-My-Sister: Roll Credits <<//EOJ

a very sorry japh-- but appopriate for the week ... 

  perl -e '$_="\n2002 cimordnilap yppaH"; print reverse split //;' 

I'm sure the JAPHies have a terser, more linenoisy way of saying
reverse, involving sordid abuse of a reserved array or some foolishness,
but if I want linenoise, I'll use J (APL in ascii). Or learn Snobol (in
which, even moreso than teco, linenoise was a valid program.)  And for
Literate obfuscation, FORTH was good. (still is)

X-Really: No
//EOJ

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