From: Travis Whitton <whitton@...>
Date: 2003-01-17T04:02:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby advocacy in sigs

> 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.

I advocate ruby on slashdot whenever I get the chance. Whenever a topic is
oriented towards scripting languages(usually Python or Perl), I always give
Ruby a plug. I've had people respond with "Wow, ruby looks cool. I'll check it
out" style comments on a number of occassions. Gentle advocacy is generally the
way to go. I.e., saying something to the effect of, "You should check out Ruby.
It combines the flexibility of Perl with a clean readable syntax and a pure
object oriented syntax.", seems to be a better route than, "I've tried
Python and it sucks! Ruby is soooo much better, and I'll never go back.".

> 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.

Everybody has their own pet language, and people don't take kindly to hearing
that anything is better than their favorite. All we need to do is turn people
on to Ruby by demonstrating some of it's elegance/power, and they'll naturally
come to the conclusion that it's the best. After having used Ruby for two days,
I never wanted to go back to Perl, and I think a lot of people will feel the
same way when they see what Ruby can do.

> 
> 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.
> 

Perl and Python both get it half right. Perl is powerful, but it's messy to
read, and it's mainly a procedural language. Python is object oriented, but it
has a rigid feel. It also leans slightly towards Java in it's verbosity. People
that use these languages know these things. Ruby is the answer to these
problems, and all someone has to do is try it to realize this. Good programmers
tend to be curious, so all it takes is a bit of appetite whetting such as:

here are some examples of Ruby's object oriented nature
9.times {|num| puts num} # 0123456789
"Hello World".reverse # "dlroW olleH"
["foo", "bar", "car"].map {|elem| elem.upcase} # ["FOO", "BAR", "CAR"]
today = Time.new # Thu Jan 16 13:38:17 EST 2003
10.type # Fixnum
(10**10).type # Bignum

Even if they don't understand the examples completely, they should be enough
to invoke some curiosity, which leads to further investigation. Another
possibility is to just point people to Ruby.new, which does a good job
covering a lot of what makes Ruby so wonderful to program with.

-
Travis Whitton <whitton@atlantic.net>