de tomKronieken

Un lunatico minore triggered an insight. Ruby is more like the unix world: make little tools, make them do one thing, and make them do it good. Then leave it to others to chain those tools together. Very much like the Linux-world, where you have one program (eg. wget) that can talk HTTP. Then, you have another thingy that can do encryption (ssh). When you want to talk encrypted HTTP, you take wget, put ssh after it, and tadaa! Compare this with the Java-world. There are Java programs that can talk HTTP. If you want to talk encrypted HTTP, though, you have to be lucky that the original programmer thought of that, otherwise you're out of luck. Said in a different way: all Java programmers have to invent the world for you, and they all have to solve all problems. The way Ruby handles things is different: take one problem, solve it, and let other people glue all solutions together. The term "modular" almost comes to mind. (That said, I'm just getting my feet wet with Rails. Am I the only one that is having hallucinations of being back in the JSP era?) Do you agree, or am I way off here?