From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2004-02-02T04:33:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Python 25 times as popular as Ruby !?

Hello Dan,

Sunday, February 1, 2004, 8:12:13 PM, you wrote:

DD> Michael campbell wrote:

>> No one said that.


DD> Yes, I was exaggerating for effect. :)

>> If it doesn't grow, it will eventually die.

DD> Will it? Is Smalltalk still growing today? It probably hasn't grown
DD> for quite some time, yet it's still around if you want to learn it.
DD> How about Eiffel? People are even moving away from C and C++, but I
DD> doubt they'll be dead for many years to come.

As the only one who uses GNU Eiffel for a program > 200.000 LOC i must
say that eiffel is dead. Two vendors stopped there support (Visual
Eiffel, Halstenbach), GNU Eiffel is becomming more and more unuseable
for real development (everything after the great renaming SmallEiffel
=> Smarteiffel) and ISE raised there prices by a factor of 3
(it's now 5000 USD for a not very good system).

Smalltalk is also dying or better becaming less and less attrictive.
Same as lisp where only Franz Lisp is still competitive in some areas.
In fact in commerical areas Smalltalk is much more dead then Eiffel.

DD> In any case (and this is a reply to several posts, not just yours),
DD> Ruby will get popular some day. Or maybe it won't, and we'll either
DD> continue to talk about it here and use it from time to time just
DD> because it's a nice language, or we'll move on to something else.
DD> The world will go on.

DD> What we don't need to do is organize a big campaign to get Ruby
DD> awareness up. We don't need to contact big players like IBM and

No but the spirit of people hacking a library should maybe move from a
"it's good enough for me" attitude to a "i want good quality" way. For
most libraries the additional overhead won't be so much. But this is
still a real problem.

DD> In the mean time, posts like, "Python is 25 times more popular than
DD> Ruby" or "Ruby needs Python indenting to be popular!" just waste time.

Like much other posting on this newsgroup, for example about indenting
styles. I posted it because i think a few people didn't recognize the
real world situtation. And this is always not good. I'm just bored
about threads that everything is fine with ruby and working well.


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