From: Gregory Seidman <gsslist+ruby@...>
Date: 2006-03-15T23:32:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Rails' effect on Ruby as a language

On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 11:38:45AM +0900, Trans wrote:
} A while back I wondered if Rails threatened to subordinate Ruby. (See
} ruby-talk:138502). It is interesting to note that for the month of
} March '06 ruby-talk has 2329 messages so far, while the Rails list
} (rails@lists.rubyonrails.org) has 3945. I don't think that's
} significant enough to confirm, but it does lend some weight to the
} somewhat troubling idea.

I have been programming for over two decades, but I only recently learned
Ruby. I used Rails as a means to learn the language, and my first real
attempt at a Ruby project was, indeed, a Rails app.

That said, I learned Ruby largely because I had been waiting for something
to come along that was an improvement over Bourne shell/awk/sed without
offending my sensibilities (the executable line noise of Perl? significant
whitespace in Python? yuck). I recently wrote a 60 line Ruby script to do
some fun things with iPhoto albums, thanks to the iphoto2 and plist gems. I
don't know if I'm likely to use Ruby for GUI apps (I'm fond of C++, C#, and
Obj-C for that), but I'll keep using it for scripting and web apps. I
genuinely like the language.

I'm on both the ruby-talk and rails lists, and they are on similar levels.
I see the following sorts of posts on the two lists:

  ruby-talk           |  rails
----------------------+-----------------------
  stupid newbies who  |  stupid newbies who
  can't read docs     |  can't read docs
                      |
  newbies who really  |  newbies who really
  want to learn, but  |  want to learn, but
  need clarification  |  need clarification
                      |
  followups to the    |  followups to the 
  above with either   |  above with either
  explanations or     |  explanations or  
  pointers to docs    |  pointers to docs 
                      |
  announcements of    |  announcements of
  books, websites, or |  books, websites, or
  code (gems, etc.)   |  code (gems, etc.)
                      |
  bitching about      |  bitching about text
  unicode support     |  encoding in JavaScript
                      |
  Ruby Quiz           |  "I made this website
                      |   with Rails, check it
                      |   out!"

Except for that last one, I'd call it a tie.

} T.
--Greg