[ruby-talk:7115] Re: Ruby in the US

Randal L. Schwartz writes:

# But I'm still a bit puzzled about the *point* of Ruby.  It's either
# Smalltalk without the IDE, or Perl without the CPAN and
# programmer/install base and wide ports, or Python without the
# annoying "it'll be indented THIS WAY or Guido will come and get you"
# feature.

Well, in terms of some-to-many people's personal preferences (at least
in this forum), you could alternatively have said,

* Ruby is like Smalltalk without the counter-intuitive syntax.

* Ruby's off the shelf OO is much easier to use than Perl's.

* Ruby has eliminated things that many people find highly annoying
  about Python.

* For many things, Perl's awesome CPAN isn't needed, although it's
  highly desirable for attaining a Perl-scale range of applicability
  (and Perl-scale user community).

* The prospects for attaining a more modest but still highly
  viable "Python-scale CPAN" in the next few years seems excellent.

But the larger point is that many people simply strongly prefer
the "Ruby way" of doing things. Moreover, many such people happen to
be in situations where the other trade-offs are sufficiently balanced
to make this the determining factor. AFAIK, in almost all such cases,
this has the happy corollary of increased productivity.

This is analogous (albeit not exactly comparable) to the experience of
many early rank and file Perl 4 users, who happened onto Perl 4 after
having used C and AWK and ksh and sed and grep. My reaction to
discovering Ruby was the same as my reaction to discovering Perl 4:
Wow! This is so cool and so useful that I think it's going to catch 
on, even though most other people that I know haven't heard of it yet.
Imagine my pleasnt surprise when some time later I happened across a
brand new Wall/Schwartz book on Perl. :-) In other words, to address
a point you raised above, I expect the Ruby programmer/install base 
to grow fairly rapidly over the next 5-10 years. In fact, I've been
expecting that since last year about this time, when I started 
working on the comp.lang.ruby RFC. Of course, like my early 
expectations for Perl 4, that's just MHO, but at least this new
expectation seems to still be on track a year later.

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)