Comment by lgleason | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lgleason | Hacker News Reader

I love Ruby and I love Matz. With that being said there are some things that Ruby struggles with. I know that there have been some conversations among the core on bringing in more functional concepts to Ruby....at least since April. To me this says that Matz is coming to the conclusion that we may need a new language to get functional right.

While I am sad to see that Ruby may be superseded by a new language I'm really happy to see Matz leading the way with one of the solutions. In the Ruby community we have a expression "Matz is nice and therefore we are nice". That has set the tone for the community in ways that have never been the same in some of the others.

As someone who has had the opportunity to talk with Matz on multiple occasions and work with the Ruby community it would be great to see this as a natural evolution of Ruby and the people who love it... As I have started to move on to working with more functional languages etc. I have started to move away from doing Ruby, but if the community can continue on and evolve with a new language that would be awesome!

> I know that there have been some conversations among the core on bringing in more functional concepts to Ruby....at least since April.

Only since April? Has there been a non-bugfix release of Ruby that didn't bring in more functional concepts to Ruby since, well, ever? AFAICT, bringing more support for ideas that come from the FP world has been one of the perennial drivers of progress in Ruby, not a new issue that emerged this spring.

> To me this says that Matz is coming to the conclusion that we may need a new language to get functional right.

I think that's reading a lot into it. Matz experimenting with something doesn't mean that the intent is to replace Ruby with it.

> "Matz is nice and therefore we are nice"

This non sequitur annoys me. Deconstructing it:

* A: "Matz is nice": Let's say we all agree this is true.

* B: "we are nice": i.e., the ruby community is nice.

* P(A -> B): (A therefore B) is a slogan, so I assume the proposition P is believed to be true. Is it?

In order for P to be true, the only option is for B to be true as long as Matz keeps being nice. Assuming Matz is still good-natured, is not hard to find counterexamples for B (every big community have some less-than-nice people). So the facts tell us that P is false.

Alternatively, if you assume that Matz is not nice, then, without mattering if "we" are nice or not, the slogan holds true (modus ponens [1]).

Anyway, my point is that the slogan is as silly as this rant :p.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_ponens#Justification_via_...

I don't understand the original quote to be a proposition. I think what it's trying to say is "Matz is nice so we too aspire to be nice". It's not descriptive, it's perscriptive.

I think the intent was more along the lines of "Matz is nice and therefore we should be nice", but in making it shorter and snappier it now uses a more ambiguous piece of the English language.

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