From: Preston Crawford <me@...>
Date: 2005-01-22T08:20:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Reasons to consider learning Ruby?

On 2005-01-21, Gennady Bystritksy <gfb@tonesoft.com> wrote:
> Buy yourself a "Big Book" called "Programming Ruby, The Pragmatic 
> Programmers' Guide" by Dave Thomas and get enlightened ;-). You can get 
> the book at http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/catalog/index.html

Thanks!

> Alternatively, you can search the ruby-talk archives at
> http://www.ruby-talk.org/ruby/ruby-talk/index.shtml

Thanks again!

> Read, compare, decide for yourself. Do not expect anybody to set you on 
> "the right road".

Of course. I wasn't expecting all the answers. And believe me, I Googled 
this topic to death. The problem is, that it always seems to end up in...

"Python is more mature"
"Ruby is more fun"
"Python has more libraries"
 
...etc etc

I'm coming at this as someone who really likes the look of Ruby and I 
guess I'm trying to find out if investing time in learning it (aside from 
just what you gain from learning the language) is worth it in terms of 
things you can actually do with it and how easily they can be done. I know 
that's a little vague, but I meant it to be vague, mostly, minus the last 
part.

> P.S. Your post is very generic and smells like a troll (I beg your 
> pardon if it is not), so do not expect a lot of responces here, people 
> are just tired.

Understood. It's definitely not a troll, though. No offense take. I 
understand how these things go (especially after Googling). If you reread 
my last part of my post, that should tell you that I'm 100% serious about 
hearing about how Ruby is being used out in the real world and what Ruby 
developers think of its chances. By that I mean that any time one learns a 
language there's obviously an investment in time if you want to get 
something out of it. Since I don't know Python, nor Ruby, but have 
leanings towards Ruby, my question was born out of sincere interest to 
know what some of you thought its future held, in particular as a language 
to develop desktop applications that need to be developed quickly. It 
looks to me like both Python and Ruby have a bright future, not just as 
web languages, but also in the afforementioned capacity, as languages to 
do RAD work where you don't want to use VB or you want to move away from 
VB or VC++. That's my primary interest and thus the reason I asked what 
you all thought of its future in that regard.

Preston