From: Dan Doel Date: 2003-08-20T18:15:51+09:00 Subject: Re: Why would you abandon Ruby? (was) Brandon J. Van Every wrote: >>The Master said: "The noble-minded worry about their lack of ability, >>not about people's failure to recognize their ability." >> >>Confucius, The Analects, XV, 19 >> >> > >Then IIUYC, you think using Ruby is about "nobility." Personally, I'm not >shopping for a noble language, I'm shopping for a useful one. In my world >view, and that of a lot of other people, deployment is part of utility. > I think more correctly: Use Ruby (or don't) because it's a good language (or isn't). Don't worry about whether other people use it. But maybe I'm misinterpreting. >>>What is Ruby's future? >>> >>> >>Standing beside a river, the Master said: "Everythin passes away like >>this, day and night, never resting." >> >>Confucius, The Analects, IX, 17 >> >> > >IIUYC, you use Ruby as a temporary expedient? You aren't interested in >whether it lasts 1 year or 5 years or 20 years, you'll just do something >else when it's time to move on? And by corollary, you don't care if >investments in worker training or IP are not leveraged over a sufficient >number of years? You figure, eh, write it over, write something else? > > Maybe: Use Ruby now because it's good now. If something better comes along and supplants it, use that. It's hard to tell what will happen very far in the future. If you get some big marketing behind stuff like with, say, Java, you get some stability, but who's to say that Java will be around in 1, 5 or 20 years. And, learning a new language is always beneficial. Different languages do certain things in different ways, and learning the quirks of an individual language can help you apply those techniques to other languages in which they aren't exactly standard (like, say, writing C in a more object oriented style, or using functional paradigms in Ruby). The benefits aren't always simply, "Will my coders be able to code in this in 5 years?" > I think you define "informed view" according to your own prejudices. It > >sounds like you're saying, "Well, if you front all this labor to get into >Ruby, well of course by then you're gonna love it!" What about people who >start down that road, but abandon it? Why are they not "informed?" Maybe >they abandon it because they discover some roadblock right away, that >obviates any need for further inquiry? Maybe they're not unintelligent or >lazy or insufficiently dedicated to programming as a lifestyle. Maybe >they're just really good at doing language product evaluations to meet their >industrial needs. > I think what he means is, if you can't use it at work, and you don't use it at home, how can you really know anything about the language? Sure, you can read through a basic syntax description of ruby in an afternoon maybe, but it takes longer to get the feel for a language. When I was first learning Java, it was difficult to figure out why OO principles are useful. It takes more than reading, "This is how you do this. You must do these things, because they're OO," to understand object oriented programming. It takes working with and building/designing object oriented systems to understand _why_ you would want to do such a thing. The same thing applies to learning a language. Each language has a unique way of doing certain things, and it takes time to understand why you might want to do them that way. Simply saying, "Because that's how you do them." isn't enough. And since you're asking "Why use Ruby?" how can someone who hasn't really used the language in any depth answer that question? - Dan