[ruby-talk:4927] Re: Some q's to Ruby professionals

On Fri, 15 Sep 2000  16:40:02 +0900, Franz GEIGER wrote:
> Ruby seems to me the FIRST language that REALLY took all the best from all
> other languages. Seems to be well thought.
> 
> As I encountered the language two days ago (in a Perl newsgroup!) I have a
> few questions. I ask them sorted by importance:
> 
> 1) Is there a visual debugger for Ruby like there is for Perl and Python
> (Pythonwin)?

Nope. Idea's were vented, threads were trodden, but nothing concrete
has surfaced yet.

> 2) When will books be available? Take alle the good Perl books from O Reilly
> or the Quick Python Reference as examples.

Somewhere next month Addison Wesley publishes a 600+ page book on
Ruby. It's reference part is already online at www.rubycentral.com/ref
In November matz's Ruby_Pocket_Reference will come out in japanse,
hopelfully to be translated into english later.

> 3) Are there other GUI bindings than Tk like wxWindows etc.?

see the Ruby Application Archvie at www.ruby-lang.org/en/raa.html for
this, and quite a bit more...

> 4) What about freezers? Are there any? One for Windows NT?

check out the download pages at ruby-lang.

> 5) Will there ever be a JRuby (i.e. Ruby for Java) to be able to run Ruby
> scripts on almost every platform on this world? (I am especially interested
> in EPOC. I know several programming languages but don't want to learn the
> programming models of all platforms in this world.)

Not very likely at this moment, mostly for technical reasons.

> 6) Perl is currently rewritten. Shouldn't there be efforts to go into Ruby's
> direction? Or taken this way round: Shouldn't Rubyists offer support to the
> Perl6 crew?
> I ask this because I heard that Perl6 will contain elements of Python and
> Ruby contain elements of both, doesn't it?

I personally have not noted any initiatives in this area. Maybe
someone else cares to comment on this?

regards and happy rubying!
Michel