From: Dick Davies <rasputnik@...>
Date: 2004-05-01T06:59:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Opportunities and pitfalls; was "Introducing myself - Sascha Ebach"

* Mike Calder <ceo@phosco.com> [0436 15:36]:
> A word of warning from a potential friend.

Some interesting points, I'll comment on a couple.
 
> Next point.  To handle what I (and probably most Java programmers) want 
> requires a good, configurable, GUI. 

You've got a few GUI choices, and that's a selling point.
Swing showed if nothing else that one size doesn't fit all, cross-platform
GUIs are not the norm. GTK on *nix works well, maybe not so well on win32.

Bear in mind that for a lot of Ruby users, 'no GUI' is a valid choice,
far better than having to install X before you can use a command line app
or a webserver, purely because the vm is linked against it.

> 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, 

That's not that different from Java though is it? Despite the fact their
download is pushing 40 Mb, you still invariably have to go and install the
software you want.

'./configure;make;make install' really isn't that much effort, and as others
have said, there are plenty of rpms / ports / whatever else you choose if you
don't like compiling your own code.

One other big futureproof of ruby is the openness of the platform - 
that should avoid any problems further down the line of the kind Sun
are starting to put people through now.

-- 
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Q:  What is your name?
A:  Ernestine McDowell.
Q:  And what is your marital status?
A:  Fair.
Rasputin :: Jack of All Trades - Master of Nuns