[ruby-talk:7240] Re: New User Survey | Ruby kudos

I'm a programmer, make my money programming and program in my spare
time. My company does mostly web applications right now and I tend to use
PHP for most of that (it's nice for that type of thing) -- I saw the
article in Dr Dobbs Journal about Ruby and myself and a friend went and
downloaded it -- I haven't stopped playing in it since Monday :-)

The one weak link I've run into thus far is the (English) documentation
and the all-around lack of example code.. Don't get me wrong, I'm not 
complaining or trying to get snotty -- I realize that the Japanese
documetation is probably very complete but for those of us who are "stupid
Americans" and only know one language, it's a bit rough to understand some
of the documentation that's there now. :-) 

Having said that, Ruby is my new console language of choice and I'm going
to suggest our other programmers learn and use it. Once introduced to Ruby, 
I don't see how any programmer couldn't love it. It's fun, fast, capable,
READABLE and an all-round nice language to code in. 
 
I've just been toying with the language for a few days and I've been able
to pick it up fairly well (even coming from a non-OOP background) and
re-write some applications in Ruby that I wrote in C in a matter of hours,
not days, it's great! On top of that, there is a hardly noticable speed
difference!

Damn nice work Matz, hats off to you!!!

Oh, after I get back from vacation, I'd love to lend a hand with the
English documentation, if nothing else, just to clean it up a bit (and add
a few examples that I think might be useful)..

Thanks!!

-Mitch

On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Phillips, Dale wrote:

> my view.... 
> I am a perl shell sys admin type. I am having trouble
> using the OO view of the world most of the stuff I do
> is less that 100 lines (but a lot of them)
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: W. Kent Starr [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2000 8:43 AM
> To: [e-mail]
> Subject: [ruby-talk:7235] Re: New User Survey: we need your opinions
> 
> 
> On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, you wrote:
> > Morning, folks. (at least it is for me...)
> > 
> > Conrad and I have been thinking about ways of improving the experience 
> > of new Ruby users. One of the things we'd need to know before we can
> > do that is just who a new Ruby user is, and what problems they are
> > having.
> > 
> 
> Basically a good idea.  One suggestion...IMO the questions 1 and 3 have
> default
> pre-checked answers.  This is probably not a good idea as someone in a hurry
> could miss one of these and thus inadvertantly provide misleading
> information.
> 
> Just a thought :-)
> 
> Kent Starr
> [e-mail]
>