From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2004-01-17T03:17:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Fighting Ruby's bad fame

Hello gabriele,

Friday, January 16, 2004, 6:05:05 PM, you wrote:


gr> [misconception 2]
gr> The next problem that ppl pointed out when talking about ruby was 
gr> "oh, yes, cool, but so little documentation..". 
gr> It seem that we won even this, thanks to a general effort about it[4].
gr> I did not heard someone talking about this in a long time, what about
gr> you?

Hmmm, it is not the amount but the quality of documentation. I still
find a lot of functions very bad explained. No exact mention what
exceptions are raised, what are the exact input values etc.
Look at the man pages for unix syscalls or MSDN to see how functions
must be documented.

gr> [misconception 3]
gr> Well, you need apps. We don't have applications. If you look at RAA or
gr> RubyForge you may see lots of frameworks, libraries, but little apps.
gr> Could you name 5 applications written in ruby and known to
gr> non-rubyists? Could you do the same with other languages?

The problem is not that there are not well known applications. It is
that there is no enterprise application and not even one larger ruby
application. I searched sometime to find one but without luck. All of
the apps could be written in one or two month. So they are no prove that
Ruby is productive for programming in the large and programming in
teams. I have no problems finding large applications in PHP, Python,
Perl, Smalltalk or even in TCL.

And yes there are real technical problems why i wouldn't use ruby for
larger applications. The common programming style of for example
adding functions to base classes like Array are a reason why i would
not recommend the language for large application programming.


-- 
Best regards,
 Lothar                            mailto:mailinglists@scriptolutions.com