From: Tanner Burson Date: 2006-02-21T00:32:05+09:00 Subject: Re: Don't let this happen to Ruby, pleeeeease? ------=_Part_1705_28498422.1140449505443 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline On 2/20/06, Dave Howell wrote: > > > On Feb 19, 2006, at 11:17, Glenn Smith wrote: > > > David - we can start a flame war, all rather pointless and doesn't do > > you or > > I or anybody else any favours. Or we can simply agree to shake hands > > and > > have a "virtual" beer. > > Or you could ignore him. *I* certainly found comments like "It takes at > most five minutes over a slow connection of clicking around to figure > that out on the ruby-lang website, hopefully much less after > the revamp, and at most 30 seconds for anyone with mediocre google > skills to get the basic points right." to be not only annoyingly > condescending, but quite opposite of my experience, which seems to > involve spending a lot of time finding documentation misplaced, > dreadfully obscure, or just plain missing, and discovering new and > different ways for those oh-so-easy installers to fail. > > I think he's probably wrong in believing that "You don't represent any > significant majority of Ruby users on any platform in my opinion." You > certainly are representing my opinions pretty accurately. On the other > hand, if he's right, then Ruby might well be going down the > incoherent-and-eventually-irrelevant path. I see there being a danger > of that, but I don't think it's at all inevitable, yet, thank goodness. > > > I think you've taken by initial post on this thread to be a real moan, > > when > > what I was really trying to do was simply put forward one user's > > perspective > > (ie. mine) of how Ruby was being presented to potential users. For > > what > > it's worth, I think your point "Programming languages and tools are not > > end-user software." is quite wrong. > > I agree. I have and use Ruby because I want to build programs and tools > for myself...in Ruby. The time I spend having to poop around with > recompiling Ruby, reinstalling Ruby, re-downloading source for Ruby, > debugging Ruby's installers, is wasted time. I wasted something like > three or four hours trying to get readline support working with irb, > IIRC. Did you document this struggle (for success or failure)? To complain about a lack of documentation is fine. To be presented with an opportunity to help the situation, but instead just complain, that I find a bit rude. And if I have to spend time sending > messages to Ruby-Talk trying to find out how to get Ruby to work > instead of programming, then Ruby's not very good. Actually, then Ruby's documentation would not be very good. The whole not judging a book by its cover and all. That isn't to say people's perception= s of Ruby are not influenced by the quality and availability of its documentation, but that doesn't make it right either :) > Pointing out weaknesses in something to its fan base doesn't always > make you friends, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. Thanks, > Glenn; hopefully your observations will help Ruby grow even stronger. Pointing fingers is fine, lending a hand will make you friends. I don't mean this is a flame, or a personal attack, as I have been guilty of it myself but I'm always amazed at the people who complain about the quality o= f documentation specifically in open source software. I've seen it on a good dozen projects, new users spend pages and pages of writing complaining abou= t something missing from the documentation, without ever submitting a hard suggestion to fix. And especially without providing a bit of documentation themselves. So please, if you find rough spots, places that you spend hours that you think you should only spend minutes, document the steps you took, the error= s you received, the problems you hit, and submit them. At the very least you'll get a better informed answer, and at the best you'll have helped produce new documentation. -- =3D=3D=3DTanner Burson=3D=3D=3D tanner.burson@gmail.com http://tannerburson.com <---Might even work one day... ------=_Part_1705_28498422.1140449505443--