[ruby-talk:11527] Re: Negative Reviews for Ruby and Programming Ruby

Well ... as someone who's been surfing the scripting languages for a
language to use in a game I'm writing I can tell you what I've found that's
put me off choosing Ruby so far.  This is a little verbose, but that's in
part a reaction to the terse amazon reviews.

As an aside, I haven't decided on whether to use Ruby or not.  Lua and
Python are the other main contenders, but they have problems for me too, so
in time honoured fashion I've put off making a decision. ;-)

On Ruby:  Not being able to build the code after a few tries is a big turn
off.  I'm a Win 98 user and not having a Dev Studio project etc set up was
annoying, but I pressed on with nmake.  For my efforts I got told I need rem
(rather than del I suppose) ... I played around with manually putting the
thing together for a while, then gave up & moved on to the binary.  This is
the latest stable build (162 from memory).  If the binary worked out ok I
figured I'd come back.  I haven't yet.

I got the install shield version, the setup was a bit jerky but nothing too
bad.  I didn't have any info on the built in functions (neat things like
.each do) so I went out & bought Programming Ruby (for $85 Australian) ...
but so far I've been floundering again.  Maybe the price has jaded me a bit,
it's a little too early to tell.The language looks ok, and the book reads
well ... but I'm only really left knowing how the person who said they
wanted to like it, but didn't (yet),  feels.  I do want to like this thing,
but ...

Another early example:  The book seems to imply (p 187) that I can get away
with including the one header (ruby.h) in my program to 'feed off' (my term)
an installed ruby interpreter, so I wouldn't have to build the interpreter
in my program after all ... (see above para about not being able to do this)
... but even at first glance (and after one half hearted try) this isn't
going to work.  Ruby.h includes a whole lot of other headers ... another
dead end.  After a while I'll go back to the source & my original plan of
building that, maybe I'll have time fro that later in eth week ... but there
are only so many dead ends before I'll move on.

My 2 cents (well, $85 now!) worth - Michael

-kn <[e-mail]> wrote in message
news:[e-mail]...
> >>>>> "Jim" == Jim Freeze <[e-mail]> writes:
>
> .-
> | Hi all: I was just at Amazon looking at the reviews for Programming
Ruby, and
> | frankly, they suck. To be more accurate, they are more negative about
Ruby
> | than about the book.
> |
> | For example, here are three of the four reviews:
> |
> (...)
>
> Hi,
>
> those critics were not very verbose, but if those people took the time to
fill
> a negative review / opinion on amazon.com probably is there something in
the
> way ruby is perceived that triggers those reactions. It would be
interesting
> to investigate that.
>
> (Hi I'm a newbie btw, but I really like what i see so far in ruby. elegant
and
> well balanced are the two comments i'll make about it.)
>
> --
>   n
> ++k