From: Nathaniel Talbott <nathaniel@...>
Date: 2004-02-03T03:43:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Python 25 times as popular as Ruby !?

On Feb 2, 2004, at 13:20, Phil Tomson wrote:

> Nathaniel Talbott <nathaniel@talbott.ws> wrote in message 
> news:<013A62D9-5595-11D8-99FF-000A95CD7A8E@talbott.ws>...
>> The next time they ask you about the bus, you're welcome to give them
>> my email address :-)
>
> ;-)  Are you still in Oregon?

Nope... but I still have in-laws there. I'm finishing up my current 
(Ruby) project, and am looking for new ones, and the top two places I'm 
looking are North Carolina (my current location) and Oregon. Even if I 
telecommute, it's great to get work that occasionally brings me close 
to family. So if you have any Oregon work, we should talk :-)


>> Seriously, I know so many _excellent_ programmers that would jump at
>> the chance to get paid for Ruby coding. I don't think buses (or trains
>> for that matter) are really a problem.
>
> I totally agree and I would add that any good programmer that has
> experience in other languages and some OO background can pick up Ruby
> and be productive in a few days.

The only qualifier I would make, from personal experience, is that a 
good programmer coming to Ruby will still be missing two important 
components after a few days - he won't be hooked up to the community, 
and he won't be aware of the available libraries. Oh, and if he hasn't 
used a language with closures, he'll miss a significant portion of 
Ruby's power until they click with him. It sounds like a sales pitch, 
but I would say that it is critical for a commercial project to at 
least have a ruby expert on call, if not on the team. What's a Ruby 
expert? Hard to quantify, but I'd say a minimum of one 
publicly-available Ruby project, and one year of reading the ruby-talk 
list.


> I was talking about management
> perceptions of the language.  We both would agree that these
> perceptions are inaccurate, but they're still a barrier.

Perceptions are, indeed, tough. I was just talking to a friend (one of 
those great programmers who would love to be doing Ruby), and he was 
saying that the consulting company he works for has 12 potential 
clients that don't care what technology is used to implement their 
projects. So of course, the salesman is recommending... .NET!?!?!? The 
salesman's justification is that he wants to use the best thing for his 
clients, and his perception is that C# and .NET are the best. How do we 
deal with that? I'm not sure, but I know that the more Ruby code that 
gets laid down, publicly or privately, that's works well and meets 
people's needs, the better it will get.


Nathaniel

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