From: "Brandon J. Van Every" Date: 2003-08-20T18:47:50+09:00 Subject: Evaluating Ruby objectively (not exactly) I can't quite match the subject line in practice, because inevitably I'm only going to ask questions of subjective interest to me. Martin DeMello wrote: > Brandon J. Van Every wrote: > >> I'll turn the question back to you. Are you personally willing to >> assess the pros and cons of Ruby objectively? Although you may have >> already answered, since you said you're tired of the talking. > > Here's an idea - why not post a series of "how do I do #{foo} in > ruby?" questions, and let the answers show you if it's a language > you'd enjoy working in? It's a good suggestion, in general. Truthfully though, I am not the kind of person who makes language decisions on this basis. I don't "enjoy" languages or "play" with them. I consider all languages to be In The Way [TM]. With the possible exception of English, which I'm pretty fluent and verbose with. For the most part I dislike programming, it is the results of programming that I value. Even then, I do not value any old program, they need to achieve certain things. Like Art. Or Entertainment. From what I've read, and what people have said, I suspect that the Ruby community has a huge contingent of people who simply enjoy tinkering with Ruby. They are awash in its expressive power. This is probably great for them, but I'm not at all convinced it's relevant to me. I've never programmed anything "truly exotic" in my life. Everything I've ever done has been pretty low level ASM grunge. Even if it hasn't been ASM, it's been over-optimized. I'm tired of it, that's why I'm looking around for a different paradigm. But I think it's probably going to be awhile before I know or care what the difference between dynamism in Python and Ruby is. Maybe I'll figure out how C# is deficient sooner, but even there I have my doubts. So what do I need to know about Ruby that I haven't learned already? Well, I'd like to know how appropriate people think it is as a systems programming language. Someone else said, scripting is good, embedded is bad. What about huge honking piles of code? What happens as you scale up? I'd also like to know, how much Ruby aficionados care about growth and promulgating the language. Do you have, for instance, any working groups dedicated to the marketing of Ruby? Or is your community not that specialized yet, or even interested in that yet? -- Cheers, www.3DProgrammer.com Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA 20% of the world is real. 80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.