From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2002-02-09T04:25:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Setting the Ruby

In article <4vM88.51661$p4.3061@news.easynews.com>,
Aidan Mark <ahumphr@DELETEgmx.net> wrote:
>
>Where will Ruby simply be indespensible and "competing" languages like
>Python, Perl and Java simply not do?
>

I did a search for Ruby on the perlmonks.org site a few weeks back and 
found that over the last few months there have been several positive 
mentions of Ruby there in the heart of Perldom.  The one I liked best:
"Ruby is Perl's prettier younger sister".  Perl refugees looking for a 
much cleaner way for doing OO will continue to make up a big part of the 
Ruby user base.

As far as Ruby niches go, I think we need to look in to creating modules 
that would get Ruby widely installed.  For example, what if we were to 
come up with a killer version control system written in and 
configurable with Ruby that would compete with and 
be seen as a replacement for CVS?  If it was good people would use it and 
Ruby would get installed.  How about the discussion about a 'make' 
replacement that was big here a few months back?  Same story, if we had a 
viable make replacement that was Ruby based it would help spread Ruby.


Other niches/strengths:
* Testing - Ruby has a lot of unit testing resources.  Could probably use 
more 'black-box' functional testing tools.
* dRuby - its so much easier to use than the XML-RPC or SOAP schemes out 
there (no http servers to set up) and it is probably also much more 
bandwidth efficient (XML being verbose when compared to Ruby's Marshal format).
* Ruby Cocoa - seems to make Ruby a very attractive scripting language for 
MacOSX. (perhaps it needs to be promoted more in the OSX community?)
* Webrick - I'm not too knowledgable in this area, but from what I've read 
here it makes it a whole lot easier to set up http servers (servlets) than 
Java (maybe someone can compare how it's done with Webrick and how it's 
don in Java?)

Others?

Phil