From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2004-02-10T16:55:00+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby advocacy (we need to write more articles)

In article <4028754D.9060009@zara.6.isreserved.com>,
David Garamond  <lists@zara.6.isreserved.com> wrote:
>Ara.T.Howard wrote:
>> one of the groups in our lab is looking into languages for a new project.
>> they are considering python, ruby, perl, and a few others.  aside from the
>> obvious ones (pickaxe, ruby way, www.ruby-lang.org, etc) are there any
>> convincing resources people would reccomend as useful for convincing project
>> manager types that ruby is _the_ way to go?  i've see quite a few slides and
>> presentations over the years - but wonder which are most up to date and
>> relevant, esp. ones people have personally found useful.
>
>IIRC, one of the things that made Python hit the newstands big time was 
>when it was 'acquired' by BeOpen and on their website they had a Success 
>Stories with big names like Google, IBM, etc. and how they all use 
>Python for biggish projects. 

Kind of like this page?:
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby

>The web page was kind of corporatish and 
>formal and all that. After that, we began to see Linux Journal doing a 
>cover + special edition on Python, magazine articles and interviews 
>popping up everywhere, etc. Perhaps we can do the same for Ruby...

I think at this point the magazine articles are ours for the writing.  
What I mean is if you can write a good article on a subject that somehow 
involves Ruby you can probably get it published somewhere (Dr. Dobb's, 
O'Reilly websites, IBM DeveloperWorks, Linux Journal, Software Developer).  
At this point there have probably been enough "Intro to Ruby" type articles, 
what we need are articles showing ways in which you've applied Ruby to 
solve some problem.  The magazines aren't going to come to you begging you 
to write an article, you need to approach them.

For example, I think that Rubyx is good for at least two articles in 
Linux [Journal|Magazine] (Hint, Hint!):
1) Rubyx: a new source-based Linux distro (I'm sure you can think of a 
better title, but you get the idea)
2) A new init system based on Ruby

I think that perhaps a "What's new in Ruby 1.8.x" could also get published 
especially if it focuses on things like syck/YAML (and how Ruby is the 
first Language to support YAML 'out of the box').

Come to think of it, perhaps an article on YAML would be in order - one 
that uses Ruby for it's examples.  I don't think I've seen any YAML 
articles anywhere.

Anybody embedded Ruby into a C or C++ program?  I think an article on 
embedding Ruby would also be good.

I'm sure there are lots of other Ruby-related articles out there waiting 
to be written.  The more you get Ruby out there into the computing press, 
the more exposure it will get.  I suspect that a lot of people here on the 
list are here because they read an article about Ruby somewhere - that's 
how I made it here to Ruby-land (Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt's article on 
Ruby in the Jan 2001 issue of Dr. Dobb's got me hooked).  All you've got 
to do is give people a good reason to download and install Ruby on their 
system even if (or maybe especially if) it's just for fun. 

Phil