Re: Opportunities and pitfalls; was "Introducing myself - Sascha Ebach"

It looks like you spent more time to compose this letter than to learn 
Ruby ;-). In any case, welcome. A few days definitely is not enough to 
fully master the language. I bet it had taken you a way more than 2 days 
to become proficient in Java. Talking about Ruby, even after almost 3 
years of using it, every now and then I find out something about it that 
still amazes me. And by the way, I've been earning my daily bread with 
C++ for more than 10 years, and now (sometimes) with Ruby ;-)

On a practical note, if you are looking for available Ruby software, 
good places to start are Ruby Application Archive (RAA) at 
http://raa.ruby-lang.org and Ruby Forge at http://rubyforge.org
Source Forge is also hosting some Ruby projects.

Good GUIs choices for you to look at might be fxruby 
(http://www.fxruby.org, binding for the Fox library) and wxRuby 
(http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl).

Gennady.

Mike Calder wrote:
> A word of warning from a potential friend.  Please don't take this negatively, 
> because I think you have something, and I'd like to help.  If you can read 
> through to the end, there's a modest proposal.
> 
> It's too late and too early for you to start evangelising Ruby.  That's a 
> shame, because right now there's a major opportunity for grabbing hearts and 
> minds.  "Too late" because Ruby has grown beyond the early days when a 
> product can be forgiven holes, and "too early" because it still has some big 
> ones - getting newbies interested will leave a lot of them dismissing Ruby 
> unnecessarily.   
> 
> I've only been using Ruby a few days, so I'm perfect to point out a few 
> things; I've no emotion invested, and am almost (but not quite) totally 
> ignorant about Ruby.
> 
> The great opportunity is that I and a lot of people just like me have just 
> realised (or are about to realise) that they have a serious need, and Ruby 
> might be just it.  But I need to be sure.  That means I need to see some 
> things about Ruby before I jump.  They may exist, but I can't see them, and 
> that itself makes the point.
> 
> I'm a Java programmer, and am sitting on a product with world-wide usage and 
> over a quarter-million lines of code.  I'm deeply worried, after the Sun/
> MediocreSoft rapprochement, about the potential future of Java.  That's a 
> shame, because for all its faults, Java is the best production language I've 
> come across in over thirty years practical experience in the industry - and 
> don't bother trying to engage me in a discussion over that; I know it's a 
> personal evaluation.
> 
> However I am sufficiently worried about the future of Java to consider 
> alternatives, and after looking around, Ruby seems the best bet out of a 
> narrow field.  The criteria are:
> 
> * Proper OO.
> * Write once, deliver once, run anywhere, in any language/locale.
> * Open Source with unrestrictive licence.
> * Comprehensive functionality, good libraries, easy extensibility.
> 
> Now you ruby experts know that ruby is good for all this.  My first point is, 
> however, that after looking at ruby in some detail for well over a full day, 
> I was reluctantly about to discard it as a possibility because it doesn't 
> support Unicode, and that or something like it is necessary for "Write once, 
> deliver once, run anywhere, in any language/locale".
> 
> Yes, I know.  But it took me two days to find out, and I *still* don't know 
> how to write or handle Unicode strings in ruby code.  Or where to go to find 
> out.  So, POINT 1.  Needs improved documentation.  As a minimum, a current 
> features, capabilities, and extensions document.  A central repository of 
> HOWTOs would be nice (how about one on how to write and handle Unicode in 
> Ruby?  The world doesn't end in Japan and America.)
> 
> Next point.  To handle what I (and probably most Java programmers) want 
> requires a good, configurable, GUI.  I'd heard of Tcl/Tk, but most of the 
> examples I'd seen were pretty simplistic and, how to say this politely, not 
> overdesigned.  Some of what I read mentioned others.  It's nice there's a 
> choice, but you can't make a choice without information.  If you make the 
> wrong choice because of lack of information, by the time you realise, you may 
> have invested so much effort that you're stuck.  I took a look at Fox for my 
> eval.  So, POINT 2.  Needs improved documentation.  As a minimum, some good 
> examples of how GUI coding can be done with different packages, and 
> INFORMATION about the different possible choices.  Oh, and the GUI code comes 
> from another website? It's a separate product?  You mean I have to install 
> *three* things? Ruby, the GUI toolkit, *then* the Ruby toolkit enabling 
> stuff?  Where's the documentation?
> 
> Finally (for this posting at least; it's too long already), distribution.  
> Windows users seem to have it nice; preconfigured downloadable distros.  I 
> use Linux, so of course I'm happy to download fifty-eight different source 
> code tarballs from nineteen different websites for all the options I want, 
> and configure, make, and install each of them (in the correct order so as not 
> to muck up pre-requisites), *then* manually add links to put the libraries in 
> the right place for my particular Linux distro, then copy files all over the 
> place when it doesn't work.
> 
> After all, that's what every Ruby hero has had to do over the years; that's 
> how they learnt how Ruby works.
> 
> Naah.  If I had any sense I'd have dumped this and gone on to something 
> productive days ago.
> 
> 99% of the people you might want to attract would have; I suspect you've lost 
> a few already.  We're not all sysprogs, and you need the ordinary joes as 
> well as the early adopters and enthusiasts.
> 
> You need to have good packages for all the distros.  Something like the Java 
> SDK and Runtime packages.  A single file download and install that contains 
> *everything* (yes, Victoria, the GUI as well).  OK, that means big files, but 
> disks are big these days, and install procs can have things called options.  
> Oh, and if you need to distribute applications to end-users (yes, those 
> mythical beasts *do* exist), you need a tool to generate customised runtime 
> install packages of Ruby and whatever extensions are needed (oh, and it needs 
> to be able to recognise already installed rubies and do deltas). 
> 
> Documentation and Distro packages.  It looks to me that Ruby has some serious 
> good function and serious good technical people (and maybe a couple good 
> designers).  There are a lot of interesting sounding people in the Who's Who.  
> Shame a lot of the links are broken.
> 
> What Ruby needs is some thought to the process side and the needs of the 
> non-techie user. I'm an application programmer, but for my sins I've had to 
> do the marketing bit to persuade people to use my products, and that sort of 
> thing gives you a perspective; it's dirty work, but someone has to do it.  I 
> think Ruby users at the moment are enthusiasts; if it's to grow, it needs a 
> bit more ease of use.
> 
> I'd say Ruby has reached the position where it needs something like a Red Hat 
> (Ruby Turban?) to package it and represent it to the world.  I'd be willing 
> to get involved in that.  What do you think?
> 
> On Friday 30 April 2004 00:34, Simon Strandgaard wrote:
> 
>>Josef 'Jupp' Schugt <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>>Simon Strandgaard wrote:
>>>
>>>>Sascha Ebach <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>[snip]
>>
>>
>>>>>And if not we could burst into a PHP meeting and try to convert
>>>>>some ;)
>>>>
>>>>A ruby crusade :-)  the history repeats itself.
>>>
>>>"crusade" is a hard word. I'd prefer calling it evangelization the
>>>traditional Societas Jesu way >;-> Actually Sascha's idea reminds me
>>>of what Greenpeace did in the past.
>>>
>>>Anyway: Ruby evangelization is important because many people who
>>>don't use Ruby simply do so because the don't know it exists.
>>
>>Agree, we need to spread the word a bit more.
>>
>>Yesterday I went to the local library, and asked a guy looking at the
>>computer books, what he was searching fore. He wanted to learn perl5!
>>I of cause recommended him to learn Ruby (or secondary Python),
>>but unfortunatly no books at the library. My local library seems only to
>>buy bunches of Visual Basic books at the moment, which is unfortunate. If
>>somehow we could infect some libraries with books about Ruby, it would be
>>great.  This is frustrating, any suggestions what to do?
>>
>>Also much more Ruby in the media would be an eye-opener.
>>
>>--
>>Simon Strandgaard
> 
>