From: Dan Doel <djd15@...>
Date: 2004-02-02T04:59:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Python 25 times as popular as Ruby !?

Lothar Scholz wrote:

>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).
>  
>
On my Windows partition, I have the free student/trial version of a
commercial Eiffel development environment installed. They seem to think
Eiffel isn't dead.

>Smalltalk is also dying or better becaming less and less attrictive.
>  
>
Smalltalk is still out there, though. I'm sure Squeak will be around for
many years teaching interested parties what real object oriented languages
should be like. Even if it's not used directly, I hope Smalltalk will be
influencing the latest generation of "buzzword compliant" languages
for years to come.

>Same as lisp where only Franz Lisp is still competitive in some areas.
>  
>
You should go tell the people at comp.lang.lisp, c.l.scheme and
c.l.functional that Lisp is dead. :)

>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.
>  
>
I'm sure the people working on code at RubyForge and the like -- that is,
the people writing code/libraries for public consumption -- already have
this mentality.

>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.
>  
>
I didn't mean that as a personal attack against you (we get lots of
posts here that say such things), so I hope you didn't take offense.
However, saying that Ruby needs Python indenting or C++ braces isn't
the real world situation. It may be the real world situation that
Python is more popular than Ruby, but how popular was Python 5 years
ago? It's just been exposed to more of the world for longer. Ruby
will get there when it gets there. It _is_ doing fine. Matz is working
to make it better with Rite, and people discussing here is helping
him along (I hope).

Not all threads here are lovey dovey. There's debate about which
directions Ruby should go. But merely posting "Python is way more
popular" isn't constructive toward making Ruby better.

In any case, we should wrap this discussion up soon. I'd rather not
see it turn into one of the 300+ message threads with lots of flame
wars (which it has a high potential of doing).

- Dan