From: Trollen Lord <trollenlord@...>
Date: 2007-11-28T02:42:47+09:00
Subject: Re: "Why I Program In Ruby (And Maybe Why You Shouldn't)"

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I have to thank you guys for your comments. I was expecting to receive only
flames and idiocy - which admittedly guided my writing as well. Instead of
that there were sane voices, at least so far.

What is troublesome in getting into tk/gtk+/whatever comparison is that what
people expect is native looking and feeling applications. When they expect
is something that is like the rest of their desktop and applications.
Something like Shoes (does not do it at this moment, but) could do it -
abstract the most common needs and allow each platform to use the proper
toolkit. There is a realization there for the masses: it might just do the
trick to cover most but not even attempt to cover all of GUI concepts and
widgets. Supportability, implementability, and it makes developing most of
the GUIs again fun and even artful. It could become, when driven by good
people, yet another feature to "suck people into Ruby" as someone hinted
that Rails is doing at this moment! Quite honestly, last thing Ruby needs is
yet another "ooh we created 1:1 bindings on our belowed favorite gui
toolkit".

As someone hinted also, multi-domainity is hard. I just feel that covering
more is required even to drive in more contributors. That's a point when you
want to develop things. Fuel the process, don't attempt to carry it
yourself. Well, what I would do if I could and knew how to:

1) Something like Shoes for Ruby, core, and default on all platform
distributions. It should also look and feel native.
2) Finish/polish the UTF8 support and fast. It must be flawless.
3) Build a (Rails? Hah!) "Rosetta" (the translation tool the Ubuntu project
uses) alike web site for easier contributing to the documentation of the
Ruby's libraries. Make it usable and the features to direct towards
completeness. Build also a sane help browser system. Come on, it's Ruby
project, small and nifty, and much needed. Improve the documentation damnit!
4) After that, pick a new domain for the hype and fun. One thing that Ruby
doesn't have afaik even 3rd party access for is business orchestration
engines. Ruby is nearly entirely out of the SOA game at this moment. Hint
hint hint. Fun project, a little bit of Yaml, defining some basic constructs
and core engine, ... It for instance would lead into a lot of attention,
support, fun, and serious interest in Ruby.

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