From: Tom Sawyer <transami@...>
Date: 2003-01-16T20:34:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby advocacy in sigs

On Thursday 16 January 2003 03:47 am, Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng wrote:
> This was right at the time of publication, but this is a moving
> target.  One of the things that Python people could not do was to
> subclass dictionaries and similar.  The Year in Scripting Languages
> suggests that they can now do this.  Perlists may argue that one
> power of Perl is its huge library (CPAN).  Therefore I'd argue for
> promoting Ruby without comparison.  Let people form their own
> judgements about relative merits.  Linguistic diversity contributed
> to Ruby's beauty and strength, so it would be unhelpful to aim to
> eradicate this diversity, or even suggest eradication.
>
>         Hugh

its funny, i was thinking about this tonight. did anyone notice the post on 
slashdot about the 2002 scripting language report we helped create (the Ruby 
part)? well if you look at the comments posted, very very few posts were 
about Ruby. in fact, all i saw was 1, and all it said was that Ruby is good, 
give ruby a try. it would seem Rubyists are into minimalist advocacy :-) but 
many of them were about PHP, which granted was left out of the report (why?), 
and they were advocating it up and down.

anyway, my point being that i don' think Ruby gets the attention it deserves 
here in the states, simply because Rubyists tend to be too "enlightened" to 
advocate their language over others. in other words, we're too nice.

now i agree with you. without a doubt. but if we want Ruby to become a widely 
used language then it needs to be "marketed", so to speak. and that means 
telling people why it is better than other languages. and it is. you know it 
and i know it. and we need to inform others of that.

i mean really, telling people you like Ruby, but hey, Perl is just as 
powerful, and Python really can do all that OO stuff, isn't going to perk too 
much attention or win too many converts. and that's really ashame, becasue 
Ruby really is an amazing language, and it would be nice if a lot more people 
were developing for it.

-- 
tom sawyer, aka transami
transami@transami.net


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