From: Ben Tilly <ben_tilly@...>
Date: 2001-03-04T13:59:54+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:11967] Re: Not Ruby, for me, for the moment at least

Neil Conway <nconway@klamath.dyndns.org> wrote:
>
>On Sun, Mar 04, 2001 at 11:40:01AM +0900, Michael Kreuzer wrote:
> > I wrote on this newsgroup last weekend about how I was considering using
> > Ruby as a scripting language.  I thought I'd post the results of that
> > consideration here.  Though these are my opinions only they may be of 
>more
> > general interest as an example of why people may not chose Ruby.  (To 
>take
> > the suspense out of it, I didn't).
>[...]
> > (1) Lua, Python and Scheme got 1 point each for being freely useable, 
>the
> > others got 0 points for their GNU licences.
>
>Last I checked, Perl is dual-licensed under both the GPL and the
>Artistic License (which is much more liberal) -- so it doesn't pose a
>restriction.

Ruby likewise, but Ruby's license differs in at least one
key respect making it safer.  (It offers a blanket OK to
being used in commercial products.  Perl has a few minor
restrictions on that.)

> > (2) Javascript (in the form of Spider monkey) and Python compiled 
>straight
> > out of the box for 1 point each, Lua could be made to compile with a lot 
>of
> > work & the others remained inscrutable. Their Unix support I'm sure is 
>fine,
> > but their Windows work is perfunctory.  Zero for all of those.
>
>Why do you need to _compile_ on Win98? If you want to install Ruby on
>Win98, try this binary distro:
>
>     http://www.rubycentral.com/downloads/ruby-install.html

FWIW Perl is normally compiled only on Windows NT and the
binaries run fine on Windows 9x.  Windows 9x is not the
best of development platforms...

>(I haven't tried it, I'm a UNIX person myself -- but thanks Andy and Dave!)
>
>Also, it's interesting that the features of the language itself don't
>factor into your decision making process at all. Personally, that's
>one of the first things I'd look at, as well as the standard library,
>the quality of the available documentation, and runtime performance
>(depending on the requirements of the project I'm considering).

I noticed the same detail.

Cheers,
Ben
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