Brugge Blog

Back at one of the No Fluff Just Stuff Java symposiums in 2003, Dave Thomas had an introductory talk on Ruby that he advertised as being worth it just for the fact that learning some Ruby would change the way you approach Java. I haven’t played with Ruby much yet, but when I asked Dave about it after a talk last year (he now advertises the same talk as “learning the pieces underlying Rails”), he reflected that one area of obvious change is a tendency to use more anonymous inner classes in Java, a fallout of getting used to blocks in Ruby.

Now I see an article on error handling makes some similar insinuations about Erlang, (apparently a niche functional language) and it could probably be said for almost any other computer language. Or, let’s face it, any language, period. Each language is going to let you express something that another language has no direct translation for, and so evokes some clearer image or feeling about the concept that is in your head.

Or put another way by Alan Perlis,

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing