From: Thursday Date: 2004-12-28T19:11:48+09:00 Subject: Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder what we can do to accelerate its adoption. I think we've all seen superior technologies go extinct due to bad marketing/perception--sadly, perception can be more important than reality at times. I think at a minimum, we need these: 1. a more formal release process--this could be as simple as documenting what level of testing goes into changes to the stable vs dev branches before they are committed to CVS. 2. a bug tracking system where we can report and view bugs--bugzilla is overkill, maybe something simpler like trac should be considered. 3. last but not least, online docs on Ruby's primary website (not 3rd-party websites) that is similar to those provided by PostgreSQL and Python. Maybe we can volunteer to create 'official' ruby docs to be hosted on ruby's primary website. Preferably using a popular documentation format that does not use frames like these: http://python.org/doc/2.4/ http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/interactive/index.html When ruby's primary website lists ruby 1.4.6 docs for download and says ruby 1.6 docs are not yet ready (as of Dec 28, 2004), it can give the wrong impression about Ruby's current pace of activity: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/20020107.html This is particularly sad and misleading because matz, nobu, shugo and many others are very actively working on improving ruby daily (we can see this in the daily cvs commits). And it doesn't provide any clues to newcomers/evaluators about the vibrant ruby community that is frantically creating new ruby projects to rubyforge. Anyone else think these few changes can make a big difference in how ruby is perceived, and consequently chosen over other languages?