From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2006-08-18T06:30:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby is exploding onto the scene as Java did at the end of 1990s

On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 06:15:12AM +0900, Leslie Viljoen wrote:
> 
> I think the more hype and marketing Ruby get the better - it changes
> it from an unknown quantity into something that deserves
> investigation. People are SO slow to explore new possibilities, I
> really think that if Visual Studio didn't suddenly come with C# as the
> primary .NET platform language, and with all the associated Microsoft
> hype, few would have bothered. (Look at 'D' for example - great
> language, but has anyone heard of it?)

I've heard of it, and it sounds nifty, but I'm unlikely to ever pick it
up.  It's not simply obscurity that has hurt D: it's also the simple
fact that the creators of D want to maintain strict control over it.
When you don't have the marketing dollars and influence of Sun or
Microsoft, you simply cannot expect your "new" programming language to
take over the world (or even a nontrivial percentage of it) without
making it freely available to anyone who happens by.  It's that simple.

The reason D is a marketing failure, for the most part, is simply that
the business model behind it sucks, and the language is inextricably
tied to the business model.  Ruby's business model kinda sucks right
now, too, in any sense that it can be said to have a business model
separate from the publishing business.  Luckily, Ruby is separate from
its business model because it's open and free, which allows people to do
things like discuss its internals in a more meaningful fashion, create
hype-drivers like Rails, and generally pick up and *fully use* the
language without having to jump through any hoops.

I'm not even sure that Microsoft or Sun could make a language weighed
down by a really bad business model actually work.  After all, while the
Java infrastructure developed by Sun has until now always been closed
source, it was still freely available to anyone that was willing to take
it as a black-box whole.  In Microsoft's case, the company has never
managed to make a closed source, proprietary, payment-required fully
functional implementation of a language work without embedding it in a
bunch of popular, industry standard applications as a scripting
language.  In fact, Microsoft ultimately ended up having to open the
specs for the .NET framework so that open source workalikes could be
developed to help bolster potentially flagging future sales (or, at
least, that's my take on it).

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"The measure on a man's real character is what he would do
if he knew he would never be found out." - Thomas McCauley