From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2002-09-05T17:35:56+09:00
Subject: Re: suggestions to the Ruby community

W Kent Starr wrote:

>stibbs has pointed out what he believes to be a widespread perception
>that may be holding back the adoption of Ruby; to that extent, IMO it is
>an issue the community should address, whether in fact it is or not an
>issue within the community.
>

The problem I think is that for a Perl or Python shop then Ruby might be 
better but not to the extent that moving from C to Perl was.

It takes a programmer to see the advantages of Ruby whereas a suit could 
see the results / advantages of Perl over C (faster development, quicker 
fixes and CPAN).

Don't underestimate CPAN, here if we have a problem we click over to 
CPAN pick up a module and away we go, it doesn't matter that it is just 
a wrapper around a .so as far as appearances go Perl has provided a 
solution and it was quick and easy.

The reason that I don't use Python that much is because it wasn't /that 
much better/ than Perl (and Perl has CPAN).

The reason I still haven't dumped Java is the copious libraries (no 
matter how badly designed) and especially Swing.

Perl => CPAN
Java => The API
Ruby => ?

There is more to the acceptance of a language than the syntax.