A good design communicates the intended use of the object. In the physical world, this communication is accomplished by "affordances" as discussed by Donald Norman in "The Psychology of Everyday Things".

Programming languages also have affordances, and they influence the kinds of solutions we develop. The more languages we know, the more we "expand our design space" so that we can come up with better solutions to the problems we face every day.

We will look at a few example problems and show how they can be solved using the affordances provided by different languages.

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RubyConf 2014