[ruby-talk:03331] Selling Rubies by the Carat

Folks:

Andy and I have a question:

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|              Why should people learn Ruby?                   |
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We know why _we_ like it, but we're interested why others do. This is
motivated by the fact we need to produce compelling preface and/or
back-cover copy that will draw people who've never heard of Ruby in to
the book, and hence in to the community.

I could go on here listing our reasons, but I won't because I don't
want to taint your answers. But, if you have any great insights, we'd
love to here them.


On a related note, we're also looking for a word to describe the Ruby
programming paradigm. Some people call Ruby a scripting language, and
sell it by saying it's better than Perl, or more OO than Python. We
don't feel that's doing the language justice,a nd in fact we go out of
our way to avoid the word 'scripting'. To us, Ruby is a great general
purpose language that's flexible enough to also let you do things that
you can do with conventional scripting languages. So what can we call
it? What one word completes the sentence "Ruby is a ________
[programming] language"? This doesn't have to be an existing term:
just a hook on which to hand a description.


Thanks in advance for your imaginative answers!


Dave