From: William Crawford Date: 2006-09-12T02:30:28+09:00 Subject: Re: anti-advocacy advocacy Tom Allison wrote: > I think you missed a point he was trying to make about the FAQ. If you > answer with only, "Linked Lists are not required" then you risk a > conclusing that Perl is bad because it is incapable of doing a simple > task like linked lists. It's a legitimate defensive position to take. No, I got the point... I was merely commenting on his reason vs the FAQ-writer's reason. They ended up in the same place, but the FAQ-writer was surprised at his reasoning. > What is Ruby's position to the question, "Is it fast?". Is the answer > a simple, "No" or is it more to the effect of "Ruby is fast enough in > production but even faster in development"? I've typically heard the > second answer. > > Simple benchmarking shows Ruby to be considerably slower than Perl -- > for > me. Is it fast enough? When my development logs in rails says I can > hit 300 pages / second it's fast enough -- for me. > >>And the last reason for this being the Vocal Minority... Why would you >>try to spread the word about something if you were -not- advocating it? >>(Or trying to persuade people not to use it, I suppose.) You wouldn't. >>So expectation of advocacy in a blog or presentation is not unrealistic. >>You have a -reason- to be letting others know about the item, and it's >>probably that you like it and want others to use it/know about it also. > > Because it has some interesting features, fast development, and may > prove > to be something really worthwhile. Developers should be aware of what > else is on the horizon that people are excited about. > > But I'm not going to risk advocating it in a production environment with > over a million dollars a day passing through it. Not until I have a > *LOT* more personal experience with the details. Eh, I don't get where you were going here. You are saying you DO advocate people learn/learn about Ruby outside of a work environment. Blogs are often outside of a work environment also. But that actually has nothing to do with the fact that if you write in a blog, you are telling other people about something with little or no expectation of a response. This is advocating. (Or the opposite, of course.) Nobody makes wikipedia-entry type blog posts that have no bias. People do, however, ask and answer questions with no bias when asked in a conversation. (On the internet or off, doesn't matter.) (I hope the torches are locked up...) I don't yet advocate Ruby for anything. I don't know it well enough. But if asked, I would explain that most Ruby programmers enjoy programming Ruby more than any other language, and feel they are a -lot- more productive at it. I have no proof, and I don't feel this way personally (yet, anyhow) but I can say this totally non-biased. If I made a blog post, I am not answering someone's question but actively seeking to give my opinion on it. There would be no point in a blog post telling what others think that I don't have enough experience in myself. But then, IANAB. I don't blog. Maybe I totally misunderstand the alure of blogging and it's actually just a place to beat your chest and pretend you're wonderful. (I sure hope not, because that says bad things about all of society.) Maybe they do just write to be read, and don't care what they're saying. Totally possible. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.