On 8/24/06, Oscar Nierstrasz <oscar at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:

> Hm.  But my Ruby scripts consist of class definitions and methods,
> and then a call to single method.

Ruby has to do it this way because it doesn't have an image.

To me, scripting isn't very OO.  However, a good scripting system
needs proper domain abstractions.  OO is good for defining the domain
abstractions.  If you just want to bash some files, you don't need to
define new classes.  But if you want to think of the files as "Paper
Reviews" or "Job Applications" then you will want to make some
classes.

People who write scripts will learn the Smalltalk expression syntax
and collection protocol.  Then they will want to write classes, so
they will learn to use the image.  They will already know a lot of
classes, so it will not be as big a shock as it is now.

-Ralph