From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2002-09-01T20:36:54+09:00
Subject: Re: suggestions to the Ruby community

This comment is relevant to this thread, but has no particular place it should
be.  Anyway...

I need a temp file.  I vaguely remember that Ruby can do temp files.  It's not
in ri, but I wasn't expecting that because it's a standard library thing,
rather than a built-in.

PickAxe doesn't have it for some reason, which surprised me.

I lent "The Ruby Way" to a friend, and I'm sure that discussed it somewhere.

"Ruby in a Nutshell" is at work.

So I'm reading tempfile.rb!

Cheers,
Gavin


----- Original Message -----
From: "stibbs" <stibbs@nothanks.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Friday, August 30, 2002 8:13 AM
Subject: suggestions to the Ruby community


> Hi, first i would like to state that i absolutely love Ruby more than any
> other language i use (perl, python, PHP, javascript, and now ruby). Others
> i work with also have taken a look at Ruby and most have the same feeling
> about it i do. That being said, we found that there is a huge lack of
> english documentation and therefore would consume to much of our time to
> learn it and apply it for use in our work.
>
> suggestions:
>
> Documentation:
>
> english speaking ruby users should get together and copy the idea of
> python's module index.
>
> contribute code snippets to pleac.sourceforge.net
>
> in general:
>
> other than documentation, maybe it would be a good idea for people who
> also know perl to go through cpan and port the modules that are very
> useful to various types of companies.
>
> I can honestly say that if there was the type of documentation available
> for ruby that there is for python our company would adopt it, we already
> like ruby because from doing a bit of research ruby has more community
> contributed modules than python. In my career as being a sys adming and
> web development programmer I have noticed is that when companies are
> looking to embrace opensource tools they look at the community support
> which basically adds up to "how many modules do they have that can be used
> in business and how are the docs". Are project manager even took a liking
> to ruby but it was agreed by all of us we can't use it due to the lack of
> thorough documentation on standard modules/classes/methods and also
> community contributed ones.
>
> Ruby is a n excellent language, with perl6 taking at least another year or
> (and most likely) more and the python community's focus on what is
> obviously hobby projects that seem to be for the most part rebuilding the
> wheel 7 times over, you as a community can should take more of a pro-active
> approach to pushing ruby onto the general public (average joe programmers)
> and companies. The way to do it is through thorough documentation and
> modules companies find useful. I suggest following in the style of matz by
> grabbing the best from other community's and applying it to ruby (python
> style documentation and the most frequently used modules from cpan).
>
> Please take into consideration my coworkers and myself do know how to use
> google and ri, we have found all the documentation and articles that are
> out there on ruby, it was pretty much a 2 week long project our dev crew
> and project manager did in out spare/off-work time. if anyone is
> interested we use apache/perl/mod_perl and sometimes mason or php for
> e-commerce systems and python for general sys admining.
>
> I like ruby, this isn't meant in anyway as a put-down, it is meant to maybe
> get some programmers to take more of a pro-active approach to spreading
> ruby and think a little bit as a small company would if there were lots of
> lazy but big competition in the same field with the idea of taking over
> most of the market share within a year or so. Once perl6 is out, if ruby
> hasn't edged it's way into a bit more companies, this is just an assumption
> (and a big one), i think it will be very hard for ruby to pick up steam
> in the english speaking countries. "The more people making use of the
> language the better!" is a great way to think imo, especially with a
> language as beautiful and useful as ruby.
>
> take a pro-active approach! :)
>
> best regards,
> stibbs