From: MenTaLguY <mental@...>
Date: 2007-11-28T06:27:54+09:00
Subject: Re: "Why I Program In Ruby (And Maybe Why You Shouldn't)"

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 05:51:51 +0900, "Trollen Lord" <trollenlord@gmail.com> wrote:
> Build process is the engineering view imho. It is the "getting started
> using something" process that you should worry about.

That's what I'm getting at.  For the most part, today, users have to
compile the library themselves if they want to use it.  That's a pretty
high bar.

At least the Qt binding actually has a win32 gem, though everyone else
still has to compile from the .tgz.  Ruby-gnome has... well, it's got
Debian packages.  Actually building ruby-gnome from source is not a
fun experience.

> Nor will slapping 1:1 bindings to some traditional single framework.

It'd be a distinct improvement, although it's not clear that any one
is suitable -- all the available frameworks involve considerable
tradeoffs.  I do think that Swing with JRuby is the best option for GUI
programming with Ruby at the moment: if you have Java, it just works out
of the box.  It's obviously not the final answer for Ruby as a whole
though, nor is it that pleasing to use.

If Shoes matures and gets the rough bits filed off, I think it could
be a solid contender for a ships-with-Ruby solution that's actually
fun.  But right now Shoes is an experiment and we're still at the
stage of doing R&D to determine what sort of shape a good Ruby GUI
library has.

-mental