From: Lyle Johnson <lyle@...>
Date: 2002-10-22T11:16:06+09:00
Subject: Re: The Decline of Scripting

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Dat Nguyen wrote:

| Last year the local Barnes&Nobles reserved several large shelves for the
| scripting world: Perl, JavaScript, etc.
| Recently they were removed. Now it's time consuming to find the Larry's
| book, it's even harder to find others (Python, Ruby, etc).
| The scripting world seems to suffer from the struggle of the economy,
| but the indonesian language section (Java) is still overcrowded.

Have you ever noticed the big displays on the way into Barnes & Noble,
showcasing the newest books and bestsellers? Did you ever notice how,
after a few weeks, those displays are replaced with new displays, with
even newer books? Why would you assume that they'd adopt a different
policy for their computer books?

Don't misunderstand me, I like Barnes & Noble a lot (and in fact shopped
there earlier this evening) but I've *never* confused them with a
technical bookstore. They load up their shelves with whatever's hot (in
terms of buzzword compliance) at the time, and then rotate those out for
the next big thing; for example, I've noticed an explosion of books on
C# and .NET at my local Barnes & Noble over the last few months.

| BTW, how old (or young) is Ruby? It is guessed that nine years is the
| test of time for a new language to become mainstream. Is it true?

According to this post (courtesy of the FAQ):

	http://www.ruby-talk.org/blade/00382

Ruby was born in February 1993, which must therefore mean that Ruby has
been mainstream for some eight months now. I wonder if anyone has
informed Matz? ;)
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