From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2004-09-07T05:10:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Gmail-based blog

In article <chid2k$32l$1@newsreader.wustl.edu>,
Charles Comstock  <cc1@cec.wustl.edu> wrote:
>Phil Tomson wrote:
>
>
>> http://ion.gluch.org.mx/files/Hacks/gallina/
>> 
>> It's a blog that uses your Gmail account.  Seems kind of cool.  Now if 
>> there were only a Ruby version ;-)
>> 
>
>See this is kinda silly.  Whenever the ruby community finds something 
>cool that is written they say "gee if only that were written in ruby". 
>Other then having access to the libGmail or whatever the blog used to 
>read out the mail from gmail what is wrong with working software that 
>runs and has all necessary features, but is written in a different 
>language?
>
>We should ask ourselves instead (if we want to see more things like that 
>in ruby) what cool thing we could do that hasn't yet been done.  For our 
>own customization we would all probably prefer code written in ruby, but 
>if we want to make a name for ourselves it won't be through code we find 
>easy to customize.  It will be through code that does something amazing 
>that hadn't been done before, or at least not quite that way.
>
>So that's what we should aim for, not recreating someone elses cool 
>inventions, but making our own that are impressive in there own right.

Quite true, though in this case I don't have php installed and didn't feel 
like installing it just to try this gmail-blog-thingy out.  If there were a 
Ruby package available, I'd try it out right away.

>
>Anyhow, i'll jump off my soapbox now.  Don't mean to offend anyone, it 
>just seems to be a kneejerk reaction the community often has, to 
>reimplement or fill a niche that is already nicely filled when we should 
>be finding new niches that are more difficult for some other languages. 
>  Not that some of the community aren't but it's just kinda silly 
>sometimes I think, for what we wish for.

However, there are cases (and I'm not saying that this is one) where a Ruby 
implementation is quite useful.  What if we had never come up with our own 
wikis (ruwiki, instiki), blogs (rublog, diaria, etc.), webservers 
(WEBrick), etc?  Sometimes (actually, most of the time) creating cool 
things is an incremental, 
evolutionary  process as opposed to exnihilo ("from nothing", a totally new 
idea).  Also, sometimes it just helps Ruby adoption if we can say that some 
feature is available in Ruby otherwise people can (and do) say "sure Ruby's a 
very nice language, but it doesn't have (Perl|PHP|Python|Java)'s XYZ 
package so I really can't make use of it in my work".

Phil