I started learning a new programming language today. It is Ruby. Having heard about it and knowing it was made in Japan but somehow I hadn't picked it up until a health IT standard guru mentioned it in his blog. As soon as my expression of interest on twitter about using it for building a knowledge base system, a suggestion from a generous geek came and I started looking into its Java VM based implementation, JRuby.
Ruby is a kind of object-oriented programming language. You can write a book on the object-oriented paradigm/programming or OOP, but let me say it just simply here, that it is a way of writing programs by putting together heaps of well-designed and proven-to-work parts and modules just like manufacturing automobiles. Actually it came from an idea of turning software engineering into a kind of manufacturing rather than of art.
However, Japan, which was once the manufacturing powerhouse flooding the world with its products, has not seen any significant software products influencing the world except rare exceptions like Ruby, the very tool for OOP. "Return to manufacturing" is the current popular slogan in Japan with the Japanese word "Mono-zukuri" which means "manufacturing things". But I think "Go for object-oriented" is more suitable slogan for that country because good objects may produce good things but it would be dangerous to making material things primary objects.
Ray Murakami
No comments:
Post a Comment