From: Mark Roseman <mark@...>
Date: 2007-11-27T07:04:59+09:00
Subject: Re: "Why I Program In Ruby (And Maybe Why You Shouldn't)"

These are the sorts of growing pains that most languages hit as 
popularity increases, but there aren't the core resources to 'support' 
that growth, in terms of the deep foundations you discuss.  Usually you 
end up with a lot of shallower efforts spread among many areas.

Regarding the lack of global vision, that's always tough for an 
admittedly general purpose language.  Making a successful language that 
is all things to all people (all done by a core group) is a recipe for 
disaster. 

There has to be a critical mass of people working in a particular area 
for there to be the deeper solutions available.  Rails is an obvious 
example of this.

Unless you've got critical mass in some other area, the libraries and 
solutions for that area are going to be shallow, as per the examples you 
gave.  That Ruby hasn't flourished as a premier platform for say desktop 
applications suggests that there isn't enough solid interest and 
commitment - a few people to take charge and a whole lot of other people 
to help them.  Expecting that to come from the core language is not 
realistic.

One specific example... I agree 100% with your comments on the pitiful 
state of GUI programming, and decrepit Tk being the default choice.  
Having said that, there is actually a group who for the past few years 
have been very actively modernizing the look and feel of Tk, while 
keeping the basic programming model.  There have been some fantastic 
results, and some great looking apps built with this new work (i.e. you 
wouldn't know it was Tk).  But none of that newer work has found its way 
into Ruby yet, so you're left with ugly (and undocumented) crap.  

The people currently working on Tk would love to have some more 
involvement from the Ruby community (both in terms of continuing 
improvements to Tk, but also just hooking up the non-crap Tk stuff so 
it's available in Ruby).  Hasn't been a lot of interest to say the 
least. 

Vision is certainly needed, but it may have to be distributed around in 
different areas.

Mark