Today, for the second time this week, I read a text that caught my attention about the hypothesis of Sapir-Whorf, that is, the way language can influence behavior and the way people think. I made a parallel between programming languages and keyboards.

Reading about Ruby, I noticed the numerous symbols and frequency with which they are used in the language. For a poor guy like me, who uses a Belgian keyboard at work and a French keyboard at home… symbols matter a lot. The creator of the Ruby language, Yukihiro Matsumoto, probably used a Japanese keyboard. Okay, it’s similar to the QWERTY Western keyboard… but I’ll just register my thoughts on symbols and languages. I remember reading earlier that the @ was chosen as the symbol for email and how some symbols were chosen in FORTRAN due to the limited keyboards of the time (1956-1957) and later used by other languages. A page I found, which illustrates the hardness of those times, can be seen here.

“The Mat” wouldn’t have used so many pipes (|) if he was using a French or Belgian keyboard :-). I’m studying Ruby again because of RubyOnRails. I’ve been having new ideas for sites and frankly, writing in PHP is out of question. I continue programming in Python. I think Python is a much clearer language than Ruby, outside my habituation with indentation and my hatred for brackets (before even using strange keyboards) and end anything. Perhaps a more thorough search on Google could indicate another framework for web applications in Python. But my problem of using Python for this task is that I don’t want to use several frameworks, creating an even bigger monster, I want to install a single package. Solve the problem. With Python, I would have to use several packages with names of animals and fruits that I’m not crazy enough to use. There are alternatives in Python maturing, but still far from what I can get today with Rails.

There is certainly art in programming, but I need to test some ideas quickly. When these ideas are new sites, it’s clear that the beautiful gives way to the fast, functional and secure. I could do something in Java, but I’m really trying to reduce the complexity of this task, reducing the number of frameworks on my future site.

Caesar still hasn’t written about Ruby and I think I won’t be able to convince him to write anything either. So I’ll take advantage of the need and post here a little bit of what I saw different in Ruby.

Back to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I’m analyzing how people think through the programming language they identify with most. It’s easy, just remember a C++ programmer and a Java programmer. Programmers in Visual Basic, Python, Perl or PHP also evoke different memories for me. Although all are professionals, there is always something in their behavior that marks our memory, like a feature and even a new stereotype.

These behavioral patterns are also visible when you learn a new foreign language. Who never had the desire to say that the program is running?