From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2005-04-03T07:54:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Getting Ruby approved

In article <mark-79FDD6.06201002042005@news.isp.giganews.com>,
Mark Roseman  <mark@markroseman.com> wrote:
> ptkwt@aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) wrote:
>> >>Neither of these points sells Ruby. What sells Ruby is the
>> >>productivity that programmers have when they use it.
>> >
>> >>This is only my opinion: I don't consider Perl as being on a level
>> >>with Ruby in this respect, and Tcl is not even close. 
>> >i'm amazed
>> >that it's not more popular than it is outside of comp.lang.tcl
>> 
>> But would you really want to do soemthing substantial in Tcl?
>
>
>Phil,
>
>I can tell you that for a lot of people the answer has been and
>continues to be "yes", they would want to do something substantial
>in Tcl.  And yes, they have been quite successful at it. 
>
>Effective evangelism of Ruby would be better served if it was not
>about implying that people who choose other tools are crazy or
>misguided (or just missing out) but about trumpeting the great
>things that Ruby has going for it, while at the same time 
>acknowledging it's still got its rough spots.

I wasn't implying that people who chose to do substantial projects in Tcl 
were crazy.  I've used Tcl on and off over the years and personally, I 
would not want to do a substantial project in it.  It's been about six 
months ago now that I was doing any Tcl, but I recall at the time it was 
rather frustrating.  I recall (and I could be slightly off on the 
details) that I was trying to figure out how to add 
an item to the beginning of an array/list instead of at the end and as I 
recall there was no built-in way of doing this (maybe the book I was 
using was lacking, but I couldn't find a way to do it without writing 
another function to do it).  Maybe that's not a big gripe, but that sort 
of thing slows down development.

People choose Tcl for various  (often valid) reasons:
1) they already know it
2) they don't know about alternatives
3) their employer mandates it's use
4) the existing codebase is already in Tcl

Personally, I wouldn't want to use Tcl for a substantial new project.
YMMV

>
>FYI, there are a lot of things in language like Tcl (and others)
>that Ruby could learn from and benefit from; because its been
>around substantially longer, its reached a level of maturity in
>many areas that provides real benefits to developers.  

I'm sure this is the case.  (BTW: examples?)

> That's not 
>to slag Ruby, but just to suggest its not perfect (yet). But
>knowing where other tools might be better today can only help Ruby
>tomorrow, and that is something that would be good for everyone.
>

Agreed.  

Phil