From: Ben Tilly <ben_tilly@...>
Date: 2001-01-15T09:18:44+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:9316] Re: Licensing issues

Mathieu Bouchard <matju@cam.org> wrote:
>
>
>On Sat, 13 Jan 2001, Ben Tilly wrote:
>
> > I have a possibly inflamatory thought for consideration.
> > The Lisp world has usually had better technology, first, with
> > a better design.  They have also usually had the attitude
> > that this fact was going to make them all wealthy.
>
> > Yet somehow they never seem to succeed in changing the world...
>
>
>
>HA HA HA!
>
>LISP, SmallTalk, Self, Unix, Multics, Amiga, NeXT, NLS are the systems
>that are the most borrowed from! It then takes 10-30 years for their ideas
>to be ridiculed, feared, accepted, embraced and taken for granted! Then
>people like you deny it ever happened!
>
>This was another possibly inflammatory thought for consideration!
>
I think you have confused me with some straw man.

Lisp etc have had the better mousetrap, first.  They
don't change the world.  Eventually the ideas and
techniques that had been used show up in other things.
Those other things eventually do change the world, and
as you say in the popular conception the original
source is not widely credited.

Lisp had virtual machines and recursion in the 50's.
OO, reflection, proper closures, in the 70's.  In the
early 80's they had an equivalent to the web.  And on
and on.  Yet the world is not programming in Lisp
today.  Nor did those ideas change the world until
after they had appeared in other languages.  (Some,
for instance closures, have still not been accepted
as basic.)

I will make a bold prediction for you.  Ruby will be
a success.  The ideas that it borrowed from Smalltalk
and Lisp will help make it a success.  Yet the
average Ruby programmer 5-10 years from now will have
a better idea what Ruby borrowed from Perl than from
Smalltalk and Lisp.  (Even though IMO it borrows more
from Smalltalk and Lisp than it does from Perl.)

Now my opinion is that 3 of the top factors for why
Ruby has a brighter future than the already existing
and more mature sources of the ideas are:

1. Ruby plays well with others.  It does not expect
    that your entire world is Ruby, it expects to
    co-exist and interact heavily with other tools
    coming from other philosophies.

2. Ruby has a syntax that looks like something
    people are familiar with already.  That avoids
    an initial shock of unfamiliarity.

3. Last but not least, Matz is giving Ruby away
    instead of trying to make money from it.  If he
    tried to charge money for Ruby I don't think
    that he would have nearly the impact which he
    is about to.

The third was my reason for bringing this up.  Create
barriers to entry and you get fewer people trying
your stuff out.  Charging up fron is a non-trivial
barrier to entry.

Cheers,
Ben
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