From: Bill Guindon Date: 2006-06-05T13:17:47+09:00 Subject: Re: I love Ruby - But how bright is Ruby's Future? On 6/4/06, Hector wrote: > I've been trying to pickup Ruby for a few months now. I've written a few > good programs that help me at work with SAN/Unix Administration. I've > also run into a few dificult(for me) programming problems. I like to > figure things out on my own so I never post questions in forums like > this, this probably contributes to my bad programming skill, but that's > besides the point. > > I'm at a point where I'm asking myself if it is worth the trouble for me > to learn Ruby. How many people are really writting Ruby? Are there any > truly robust, good applications being written in Ruby? How well are Ruby > libraries being maintained? I know there is a lot of documentation for > Ruby but I find it hard to find very specific docs. Python seems to have > a whole lot more doc and many more books exist for Python. Does Python > have a greater following. I love Ruby but I don't want to waist my time > with a laguage that may not have a future. > > I don't really care about learning 10 programming languages. My brain > wouldn't be able handle it. I want to learn 1 or two languages and learn > them well. I know Pascal very well, I know Perl pretty well, now I > would like to get away from Perl and so I started out leaning Python. I > think Python is ugly and not very fun to write. I then jumped into > Ruby(a whole lot of fun!) but I don't get the warm and fussies about > Ruby's lasting power. Python probably does have a greater following, but is that the deciding factor? Java has a bigger following than Python, and I'm fairly sure that C can beat Java on that. If 'largest following' were everything, we'd all still be listening to ABBA or the Village People (thank God we aren't). Does it matter? If Ruby helps you with something today, odds are it can help you with something tomorrow. If there's never another release, will that change that fact? If you like what it does now, use it now. If you like the next upgrade (if there is one), use that. If not, contintue to use it as it is. If you don't like it does now, well then, why would you care what it does in the future (for that matter, why would you ask the question)? In a nutshell (or any shell of your choosing), Ruby is what it is. You either like it, or you don't. Let that decide whether you use it or not. NOT Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. > -- > Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. > > -- Bill Guindon (aka aGorilla) The best answer to most questions is "it depends".