[ruby-talk:7110] Re: Ruby in the US

Randal Schwartz wrote:
> For what it's worth, since a lot of people unfairly call me a Perl
> bigot, I'll say that what little I've seen of Ruby, I like.

Great to know. I really didn't follow Perl discussion so much to have any
opinions of Perl bigots. And great that Ruby gives you good impression too.

> In the memespace of the web development world, selling Ruby will be a
> lot harder than selling Perl

You're probably right about that. At least, because if there's such thing as
a slice for "script languages" for the web, Perl has a good portion of it
already. But I like the fact that many of the current Ruby users are somehow
related to web development.

> I think it'd be better to make sure that the Perl and Ruby camps join
> together.

I have nothing against it, and I'll wait eagerly what Perl6 brings with it,
but right now we can live peacefully side-by-side, together. I don't know
how the conference at Japan ended up, but there was a Perl/Ruby happening.
So I guess we're already living in that dream :).

> But I'm still a bit puzzled about the *point* of Ruby.

It might be hard to evaluate any one of the languages which could easily be
treated with "Yet Another Language" attitude, because they lack for example
vast user base, or free module library or something.

> It's either Smalltalk without the IDE, 

Yes, it has no good integrated GUI development environment. But I think it's
great Ruby stand on it's own even without one. If there will be good IDE
someday, it'll make Ruby even better.

> or Perl without the CPAN and
> programmer/install base and wide ports, 

OTOH, we have RAA

  http://www.ale.cx/mine/raa.html

But if you talk about the size of it compared to CPAN, we're really not
there yet. I guess I wasn't in the neighbourhood when CPAN was set up, so I
don't know where it all started. RAA is very small, but will get bigger all
the time.

But, there's lot more good in Perl world than CPAN only. Like superior
support, lot of very bright heads, sheer number of happy developers, status
and brand, and not to mention the language itself and it's extensibility or
tweakability.

I had to fight in my company to get Perl installed on production machines,
but once it was done it seems there's no end of programs without maintenance
team which are found from the production machine on daily basis :).

For all of the points you mention Ruby isn't there (yet). But even so, I
moved already to Ruby world, being still "forced" to use Perl at work.

Why I moved? Well I find Ruby to match my needs much better. I didn't need
yet another trick to utilize, I needed a language to do the job. I find I
program much faster with Ruby, and most of the time can utilize the same old
Perl tricks to do it even faster. (There's actually a bunch more. :)

There're certainly tasks for which I'd grab Perl if allowed, but most
probable reason would be the fact there's something nice at CPAN already for
that particular task.

> or Python without the annoying
> "it'll be indented THIS WAY or Guido will come and get you" feature.

There's a lot good in Python world too. I just didn't get too deep to not
find my way out :). I wasn't annoyed about the indentation, since I'm doing
it anyway. I was annoyed a little by the fact __you_have_magic_functions__.
But even all those features are small, and one probably gets used to
everything.

I was amazed by pure readability of Python. I got almost the same feeling
with Ruby. Of course you can mess up Ruby too, and lose that feeling quick.

Nevertheless, I was more compelled by Perl than Python so having something
in between is quite natural way to go.

> What do you want to accomplish with Ruby?

Umm.. I like to use it for all the small tasks I can't do better with
something else, and it seems I'm using it a lot (and more every day). I've
not done any big project with it (>5k lines), but that's partly because even
a large project doesn't require so many lines. 

I'd estimate that my Ruby programs are even smaller than Perl ones, but OTOH
I wrote very wordy Perl for readability. The other fact is that when I had
to write a small proxy in Perl it took better part of the project timeline
to write the same thing what was coming to lib-www-NG, meaning buffering,
event handling etc. (haven't checked if NG ever made it into normal
versions).

It happened I had to write another proxy kind of thing, and this time I
decided to utilize Ruby for a test. What I found was ease of development as
I spent very little time on "missing features", and code was very easy to
write. However, I found something to wish for too. Namely performance issues
regarding GC, but I could overcome them. (And there's already fix for GC
changing my problem case to linear one, and new GC in the works, which will
probably help tremendously all kind of code.)

All in all, I like the community a lot and Ruby very much. And I'm not here
because I think Ruby will be "the next hot thing" (even though I think that
inevitably will happen). It just does the job for me. And does it nice.

	- Aleksi