From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2008-04-08T13:00:07+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby’s not ready - an indepth essay 2008/4/7 Song Ma : > Interesting. But what I am thinking about is not the attitude of the author, > but the points he was trying to make. The deep review and discussion will > benefit the language insights. There's no deep review here. It's a shallow review written in a shallow way. The author is completely and wholly incorrect that: "The options for Ruby 1.8 users are to install 1.9 or the third-party Oniguruma package... In general, it's a bad sign when a third-party reimplements a large chunk of functionality in an existing piece of software." This represents pure ignorance. Yes, Ruby 1.8 users must install Oniguruma for the features that Oniguruma provides. But it's not a "third-party" product as such; it *is* the Ruby 1.9 regexp engine. This fact has been known and stated for at least three years, and Oniguruma is made available as an option for people who need the additional features. (Free clue: not many. Those who do need it really need it. Most people don't.) The author is similarly wholly ignorant of Ruby 1.9 and Ruby 2.0 discussions and assumes that "lack of English documentation" is the same as "lack of documentation." The author is a fool for believing the claim that Ruby 2 has been in development longer than Perl 6. Perl 6 was ramping up as I switched to Ruby in 2002 and Ruby 1.8 was released a bit after that (I got my Ruby 1.8 Pickaxe at the 2005 RubyConf in San Diego). Matz has been talking about the next generation of Ruby (Ruby 2.0) for a while, but that's no different than the discussions and experiments surrounding Py3k. Worst of all, the author treats both the Alioth shootout and the Zed Shaw rant as things worthy of positive attention, when both are, well, worthless. The Alioth shootout has been known to be worthless for years yet periodically some idiot treats it as serious. Zed's rant was a *rant*. It too had things that are known to be false, things that are probably libellous, and things that were simply taken out of context. All in all, the authors pretend to be objective when they are anything but. They've drunk the Guido-ade and as the resulting article shows had no interest in showing Ruby in a positive light. Most of the things that they've mentioned are *differences* from Python (neither positive nor negative) or have little importance to most applications. (Yes, Virginia. Most people don't need full-on Unicode munging in their code. It's necessary when you do need it, but most people don't need it.) This article deserves to be buried with great prejudice. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/ * austin@halostatue.ca * http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/ * austin@zieglers.ca