From: Aidan Mark <ahumphr@...>
Date: 2002-02-08T18:04:55+09:00
Subject: Setting the Ruby

Around 1994 I was writing a book on Perl. I mentioned this to an old timer.
Whats Perl, he asked ? I explained. "It will never be heard of again" was
his comment.

Of course Perl far from dissapearing became the swiss army knife of
programming due mainly to its use for CGI programming in the early web. Sure
Perl had nice features like regular expression string processing, DBI
interfaces, and a growing module base but it was principally the CGI niche
that launched it out of the obscure programming language corral. Lincon
Stein's CGI.pm made it simply unbeatable in this area (until, sadly maybe,
PHP came along).

My question is therefore which niches do people predict will launch Ruby
into the mainstream?

Where will Ruby simply be indespensible and "competing" languages like
Python, Perl and Java simply not do?

Aidan