“Even if you have no idea what Ruby is, this simple little program isn’t too difficult to decipher.”
I hate to completely disagree… but I do. I had to look more than one thing up to work this out. I do not normally have this problem with Java or PHP, or anything else which at least sticks to relatively normal grammar and syntax (i.e. C/Pascal style)
Surrounding things with | and using = ???
I have to say I was put off of Ruby by the learning curve… its not impossible, but I don’t feel its worth it.
It is one of two languages to have achieved this for me, along with Haskell… I picked up and ran with Java, JS, C, C++, VB, C#, PHP, Python and numerous other small ones not worth mentioning. I was only ever taught Pascal and Ada…
Not to ignore the rest of the blog. Its a shame that compilers can’t solve the parellisation problem yet… but its to be expected. The necessary information just isn’t there for the compiler to optimise most of the time. Its difficult to identify a canonical for loop for example…
Personally I feel the immediate future for this is something like OpenMP where the programmer personally marks up what is easy to parallelise to help the compiler out. A compiler that parallelises general procedural code may in fact be impossible… it has not been shown to be impossible afaik, but its not been shown to be possible either…