From: slumos@...
Date: 2004-01-19T16:00:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Fighting Ruby's bad fame


I like to think I've done my small part for Ruby advocacy.  About two
years ago I started using Ruby as a prototyping language, now it's my
group's main language.  Last year we delivered 3 reasonably large Ruby
applications based on our research.  We brought in a new developer
recently, and one of my co-workers told me "I gave mouse the Ruby book
and told him to go off and learn Ruby...well actually I told Ruby to
go teach itself to mouse."  (we talk in usernames around here).

I was a big Perl guy, but now I haven't touched Perl in over a year.

(I just wanted to show where I'm coming from.)

When you install Perl, you get a completely unified and consistent
documentation system and a well-organized and consistent module system
and the ability to trivially install almost any module.

That's a really nice feature, and Ruby has nothing close.  If you are
thinking about pointing to RDoc and raainstall, I'm sorry but you're
in denial.  With Perl, if I suspect there is a module called
XML::Parser, I say something like "perl -MCPAN -e shell" and "install
XML::Parser".  If I only suspect that Perl has an XML parser, I'm
likely to guess that it's called XML::Parser.  If I want
documentation, I say "perldoc XML::Parser" and it finds the
documentation.  If it can find the module, it can find the
documentation, and it looks basically the same across modules.

I should mention that I've never used raainstall, but even if that is
a solved problem, it doesn't handle the documentation problem.  In my
experience, a random Ruby module may come with RDoc, or RD, or an HTML
file, or a README, or nothing.  A lot of modules that use RDoc only
document methods, not philosophy / usage / examples.

I know that sounds like I'm criticizing, but really I'm not.  I'm just
not good at writing diplomatically.  I consider the above a minor
inconvenience at worst, although I am generally more likely to write
my own module before I try to figure out an existing one without good
documentation.  I just don't think it's productive when some people
say Ruby documentation is "not good enough" or "not as good as Perl"
and the Ruby community simply declares the problem solved or a myth.

It's worth noting that if Perl has "better" documentation, it's
because the core Perl people purposely built a community where
non-conformism was punished.  The transition from Perl 4 to Perl 5 was
marked by anyone asking for help with 4 being told that they should
use 5 instead, and anyone announcing a new program being told they
should rewrite it as a module instead.  I don't know about anyone
else, but my impression of the Perl community at that time was not
certainly not that it was friendly.

Steve