From: David Ross <drossruby@...>
Date: 2004-09-07T05:11:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Gmail-based blog


--- Charles Comstock <cc1@cec.wustl.edu> wrote:

> 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?

I can see a person wanting to write a library sure,
but not application(unless.. its not round -
development slow, buggy software, etc). Most of the
time you will see the newer programmers wanting to
port an application by language. I don't know why they
want it, but they just do. THen the development will
die and they won't ever touch it again. Oh boy.

> 
> 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.
> 

Right, there are plenty of other things to be done
here, not porting some application written in another
langauage. I think we need more applications and
science/math libraries :)

> 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.
> 

Many times I see it, I wonder if it is just to look
cool, OTOH we do need a ruby CMS. I was working on
something really neat, but I have to eat. Soo.. back
to money maaking with ruby shall we? ;)

> 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.
> 

Your opinion is noted, and hopefully other people will
take some thought into your email than just brush it
off like some of the newer programmers will be doing.

> Charles Comstock
> 
> 


--David Ross


		
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