From: Matthew Smillie <M.B.Smillie@...>
Date: 2006-06-08T22:37:34+09:00
Subject: Re: I love Ruby - But how bright is Ruby's Future?

On Jun 8, 2006, at 5:33, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> Matthew Smillie wrote:
>> For big values of long - your guess is likely as good as mine, but  
>> I'd
>> pick Lisp.  Four decades and still going strong.
> Actually, Lispnik Paul Graham is "redesigning" Lisp to last 100 years
> (from now). Do a search for "Paul Graham" and "ARC" to see what he's
> proposing. It hasn't moved a lot recently; perhaps he's leaning  
> towards
> jumping on the Ruby bandwagon. :)

I actually pointed towards Paul Graham earlier in the thread, though  
not about Arc in particular.  I've been watching Arc for a while, and  
I think I'll reserve judgement until it actually appears.  My bet is  
that PG's been sidetracked by the spam issue in much the same way  
that Knuth got sidetracked by TeX while writing the Art of Computer  
Programming.

>> And as a result, "business acceptance" in its traditional sense is
>> becoming less relevant to language design because typical businesses
>> are contributing less to language design; essentially nothing in
>> direct terms, and even their marginal contribution of providing jobs
>> to direct contributors (i.e. jobs not involving those contributions)
>> is proportionally lower than it ever has been.
> Hmmm ... well, maybe business didn't contribute much to the design of
> *Ruby*, but C, C++, C#, Java, Visual Basic, APL and Fortran were
> designed by businesses!

Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (and their  
colleagues and collaborators) may disagree with your assertion that  
they are 'businesses' rather than 'people'.   APL emerged out of  
Harvard's proto-CS department (not really a business), though the  
name of its creator eludes me.  I'd also be willing to bet that there  
was an individual at IBM directly responsible for designing Fortran  
(though this hunch is based more on the nature of Fortran and the  
size and nature of the industry at that point in history than any  
concrete knowledge).

This was exactly the point I'm trying to make: if a business wants  
something which conforms to their needs, they need to directly invest  
in the process of its creation.  Such as by hiring people like those  
listed above to design languages.

In any case, it wasn't the Suns, Microsofts, and IBMs of the world  
that I was talking about, but those companies who aren't in the  
business of creating languages and tools, but merely sit on the  
sidelines and say "but is it Acceptable to Business?  I won't let you  
use it unless it's Acceptable to Business."  Their contribution to  
projects like Ruby (or even Java, if you include its community  
process) has always been the marginal one of providing incidental  
employment to people who made direct contributions in their spare time.

That marginal contribution has recently been dropping in importance  
for a number of reasons, so it really shouldn't surprise these  
businesses that projects to which they make essentially no  
contribution don't really reflect their needs.

What I'm trying to point out is that standing on the sidelines saying  
"wow, you've got a really nice project there, maybe you should make  
it Acceptable to Business so I can use it" is an unrealistic  
solution,  at least in part because the implicit threat of "or noone  
will ever give you money for it" isn't particularly true anymore.

matthew smillie.