From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2008-04-08T23:32:58+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby’s not ready - an indepth essay Rob Sanheim wrote: > 2008/4/7 Song Ma : >> F.Y.I >> >> Not sure if you guys have read this article, I am going to re-post it here. >> >> http://glyphobet.net/blog/essay/228 > > The only good point in that whole mess is that the current state of > docs for Ruby is poor, and could use a lot of love. Well ... I guess that depends on which docs you are talking about. There's plenty of documentation on Rails, three of the major GUIs -- Shoes, FXRuby and QtRuby -- have books in "print" on them, there are two major Ruby "cookbooks", the documentation on Ruport and RSpec is excellent, etc. A week or so ago when the Ruby Mendicant was considering working on the docs, I expressed the opinion that the documentation is the responsibility of the creator -- someone shouldn't have to do it for them. Now if the creator is a better coder than tech writer, perhaps the project can take on someone. But my experience has been that it's very rare for someone to be an excellent coder and a poor tech writer. I read the essay and all of the posts about it here so far, and my own personal opinion is: 1. Everything he said has been said before -- it's basically a rehash of old criticisms. 2. My main concern is not with the documentation. My main concern is that both the syntax and semantics of the language seem to be more fluid than "pragmatic" considerations would dictate. I more or less grew up with FORTRAN, although I missed FORTRAN I. So I'll use its evolution as an example. Ten years into its evolution, an ANSI committee was formed to standardize the language. Users and vendors sat around a huge table and thrashed out what would break the least code, what was easy to implement, what kinds of programs people wanted to write in the language that they couldn't, etc. The result was FORTRAN 66. 11 years later there was FORTRAN 77, etc. Now FORTRAN is 50 years old, there's a FORTRAN 95 standard, and the language is still in use (I think -- I haven't written any since 1990). Ruby is a tad older than ten years, and I think maybe it's time for some standardization on the syntax and semantics. I think there are enough "killer apps" now that we know what we can't take out of Ruby without breaking Rails, RSpec, Ruport, etc. And from MRI, KRI, jRuby and Rubinius, I think we know what's easy to implement and what isn't. But what I have no clues about is what programs people want to write in Ruby that they can't write now.