From: Christopher Dicely Date: 2009-04-13T01:42:49+09:00 Subject: Re: Can Ruby stay ahead ? On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Robert Klemme wrote: > On 11.04.2009 21:14, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote: >> >> The truth is the C implementations of Ruby are only one part of our quest >> to conquer the world...there are a lot of developers out there on existing >> VMs and platforms that need to be brought into the fold. And they're not >> going to leave those platforms. The best way to bring them over is to >> embrace the Ruby implementations for those platforms, and do everything >> possible to make sure they're top-notch. The alternative is losing mindshare >> to languages like Groovy or Scala on the JVM or IronPython, F#, or C# on the >> CLR. > > But why do you say those people "_need_ to be brought into the fold"? Do we > (or Ruby) really loose something if we do not insist on converting the world > over to Ruby? Unfortunately, yes. Broadly speaking, the less widely used a language is, the less effort and investment is placed into maintaining and advancing it. But diversity helps, too, as the best new ideas from Ruby may well come from things that come from other languages which encourage different ways of thinking about the same problems.