From: Igor Pirnovar Date: 2010-05-08T06:14:47+09:00 Subject: Is Ruby ready to embrace new Linux face and UI realities? I may be utterly out of line expecting sympathy for my concerns about Ruby's readiness to move on to the new and upcoming GNOME-3 environments, but I need to point out that after I embarked on completing the Ruby/GTK2 Tutorial, I grew increasingly unhappy with the the GUI solutions currently available in Ruby on Linux platforms. Do not understand me wrong, there is an abundance of available GUIs one can use in Ruby, the most prominent are FXRuby, or Tk that should supposedly run on "any" platform, however, it would be absolutely vital for Linux to make Ruby feel at home in its native Gtk-x and GNOME-x environments, the issue which is at the moment far too much neglected! Also perhaps only due to its rather incomplete documentation, the Cairo graphic interface is rather poorly represented, and does not seem to be a working as an integral part of Ruby GUI experience on Linux platforms. The messy installation procedures and fixes required on Ubuntu in order to synchronise Ruby 1.9.1 and the GNOME-2 haunt us persistently to this day. The promises, such as GTK-OSX of GTK+2 on MacOSX, or a even RubyCocoa which became outdated in the shadows of a superior MacRuby almost before it saw the light of the day, nevertheless, convinced me more than a year ago, that I should have perhaps started thinking to prepare for departure from my favourable Linux platforms towards more "reliable" commercial ones. Apple's famed reputation for their superior OO technologies inherited from another of his babies the NeXT, on which Steve Jobs modelled and rebuilt all modern Mac OS X platforms, made it easy for me to decide what should be my path away from Ruby on Linux. This move, however, turned out to be not only a miserable mistake, but also futile and a complete waste of almost a year of my time. As I was encouraged at the beginning, by authors of many Cocoa books and almost universally, by their blissfully misleading and contradictory statements, convincing a reader that transitioning to objective-C and Cocoa should be a snap, on one hand, but on the other, amazed by brainless clich辿s telling me "that programming is hard", and that Cocoa could never be mastered due to its verbosity similar to human languages and its enormity that "comes to a total of several tens of thousands of pages of material" [name one language that has a dictionary of this size;^(]. So a year ago, when I ventured into Mac's developer world, I ignorantly dismissed and brushed these "metaphorical claims" aside, until after the course of studying this over thirty years old and almost "idiotically" verbose OO monstrosity, I started to realize, how backward "old state of the art Cocoa" became today, and that Apple would do itself an incalculably large favour had it moved to MacRuby, which in turn would most likely destroy it, because nobody wold give a damn about their geriatric objective-C and outdated, fossilized and unnecessarily verbose Cocoa UI or API. That is perhaps why MacRuby for years can not move away from its 0.x release numbers. Again this is not to say, that Cocoa as an OT, and particularly from the OO/D perspective is in any way a bad product - far from it, it is still superior to anything I have seen so far, however, its implementation is totally out of date. Related to the above, I have two questions: (1) Does anybody know what is the status of Ruby 1.9.1, Ruby/Gtk and GNOME-2 in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and what are the plans for integration with future releases of GNOME 3.x. I guess, we still have a year before that happens, but that does not make me any less concerned, since there continued to be rather unpleasant surprises for some of us, who wanted to work with Ruby/Gtk on Ubuntu? (2) Will the shift to GNOME 3.0 shell in future Linux releases effect Ruby/Gtk and Ruby/Cairo? -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.