Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity

[Alexander Kellett]

Let us leave the 'hyping' to others. I'm sure there are plenty of
folks who can easily point to more irony (morony) or even stupidity in
my response. But I hope the energy will be channelled into making (i)
and (iii) happen instead.

i'd love to see (iii), with a format of docs that i like.
single page preferably. i still find myself going back to
the syntax page in the 1.4.6 docs as this still remains the
most concise description of most things. the quick ref from
zenspider [1] is awesome. it would be very nice to see this on
the main ruby-lang.org page.

Alex

[1] http://www.zenspider.com/Languages/Ruby/QuickRef.html

 

[gabriele renzi]

Aquila ha scritto:

Mark Bennett wrote:




Certainly! I have been looking for such an introduction when I first tried
Ruby and I really missed it...
A small introduction of the different concepts (that differ from other
languages) is very usefull, that's the one reference I look at when tasting
new programming languages.

well, the more the merrier. If you'd write it, I'd provide a translation

 

[gabriele renzi]

Jonas Galvez ha scritto:

So, yeah, I'm sold. I've recently registered the domain ruby.com.br,
where I plan to publish a few tutorials in Brazilian Portuguese, and
maybe occasionally in English too.

well, provide us with notice whenever you'll do that

Good to be a part of this growing community.

great to have some more happy people on board,
helps keeping good karma in the community

 

[Ben Branders]

I'm a relative new user to Ruby, and to programming in general. A long
while ago, I programmed in BASIC. I also tried a bit C and Pascal, but
nothing big, always those little calculator programs.

Last year, I tried Ruby and I really, really liked it. But even after
reading 10 tutorials and the PickAxe book (online), I still don't
understand it.

I think Ruby lacks a good beginners guide. A guide that explains what
OO-programming is and how you can do it in Ruby. A guide that explains
everything with very simple programs, from A-Z.

Every guide/tutorial that I encountered was too difficult for a beginner
to follow, certainly if you have no OO experience (or programming
experience for that matter). All the existing documentation is written for
people who have already programmed in Python, Perl, ... . I didn't program
Python or Perl, so I don't have anything to compare with. I just want to
learn Ruby.

There is a big group of wannabee programmers out there, and a
beginnersguide would be a good introduction for them. It's much easier to
convince a new programmer to use Ruby, than to convince a Python-user to
convert to Ruby. ;-)



Regards
--
Ben Branders http://bytewarrior.madoka.be

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[Aquila]

I think Ruby lacks a good beginners guide. A guide that explains what
OO-programming is and how you can do it in Ruby. A guide that explains
everything with very simple programs, from A-Z.

Have you tried <http://poignantguide.net/ruby/>? My conclusion is that the
current documentation isn't optimal, it should be more structured.
When you browse for ruby programming you find all kinds of tutorials,
perhaps those should be more concentrated on the ruby-lang homepage?

 

[gabriele renzi]

Aquila ha scritto:

Ben Branders wrote:




Have you tried <http://poignantguide.net/ruby/>? My conclusion is that the
current documentation isn't optimal, it should be more structured.
When you browse for ruby programming you find all kinds of tutorials,
perhaps those should be more concentrated on the ruby-lang homepage?

well, they're linked from the "more.." element in the documentation
section on the right:
http://ruby-lang.org/en/20020103.html
btw, I'm wondering if non-english documentation should be listed in
separate sections in that page..

 

[Ben Branders]

Aquila - 30/12/04 16:29:

Have you tried <http://poignantguide.net/ruby/>?

Yes. I tried that. It's one of the guides I actually liked.
Although some of the cartoons are hard to follow for non-native speakers,
everything was explained quite good.

My conclusion is that the
current documentation isn't optimal, it should be more structured.
When you browse for ruby programming you find all kinds of tutorials,
perhaps those should be more concentrated on the ruby-lang homepage?

You are right. Current documentation certainly isn't optimal. Especially
localized/translated docs are hard to find for a beginning user. I know
that Ruby is a 'young' language compared to others, but there should be
more documentation for beginning users. Much of the documentation is still
in Japanese, which is unusable for me (and many others)...



Regards
--
Ben Branders http://bytewarrior.madoka.be

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[Aquila]

btw, I'm wondering if non-english documentation should be listed in
separate sections in that page..

I was wondering exactly the same, I really can't read Chinese or Japanese (a
pity when learning Ruby).

 

[James Britt]

Aquila - 30/12/04 16:29:



Yes. I tried that. It's one of the guides I actually liked.
Although some of the cartoons are hard to follow for non-native speakers,
everything was explained quite good.




You are right. Current documentation certainly isn't optimal. Especially
localized/translated docs are hard to find for a beginning user. I know
that Ruby is a 'young' language compared to others, but there should be
more documentation for beginning users. Much of the documentation is still
in Japanese, which is unusable for me (and many others)...

Do you know about www.ruby-doc.org?

Did you browse around there?

What was your experience?


Thanks,

James

 

[Premshree Pillai]

Aquila ha scritto:

well, they're linked from the "more.." element in the documentation
section on the right:
http://ruby-lang.org/en/20020103.html

Though it doesn't make *that* big a difference, I think the Ruby
website (ruby-lang.org/en) should have more "readable" urls. I mean
why should the download link to Ruby be something like
http://ruby-lang.org/en/20020102.html instead of something like, say,
http://ruby-lang.org/en/download

As I said, this is not necessarily terribly important (with search
engines and stuff), but why not?

 

[Zach Dennis]

Do you know about www.ruby-doc.org?

Did you browse around there?

What was your experience?

I don't like how ruby-doc.org's front page is set up. I hate the
navigation. You have:

little_link little_link little_link
Content

Content

Content

The links should have a big graphic next to them, or as the link:

===========|
=API =|
= DOCS =|
= HERE =|
===========|

Your separate sections like URL-based Documentation Queries need to have
some way to set them apart from the next immediately above or below, or
a better looking header.

From a UI point of view you want your user's to be drawn to specific
area's on your page from a left-to-right, top-to-bottom way. Ruby lang,
and Ruby-doc web sites both do not do this.

As a user, any time I go to ruby-doc.org I have to train my brain where
to look, because I don't receive any helpful tips from the website, it's
layouts, or any graphics.

just my 2 cents.

I'll even make the buttons, and a mockup for a new page design which
would involve some css and some graphics.

just my 2 cents.

Zach

 

[James Britt]

...


just my 2 cents.

Thanks for the feedback.

I hope to have an improved version Real Soon Now.

James Britt

 

[gabriele renzi]

Aquila ha scritto:

gabriele renzi wrote:




I was wondering exactly the same, I really can't read Chinese or Japanese (a
pity when learning Ruby).

actually I was thinking of french or italian or german

 

[Curt Hibbs]

Thanks for the feedback.

I hope to have an improved version Real Soon Now.

Great... I'm glad to hear it!

I, too, have trouble finding things on ruby-doc, but I was always so
appreciative that ruby-doc even existed, that it never occurred to me to ask
for improvements!

Thanks for all your work,
Curt

 

[Jason Sweat]

Aquila - 30/12/04 16:29:

Yes. I tried that. It's one of the guides I actually liked.
Although some of the cartoons are hard to follow for non-native speakers,
everything was explained quite good.

I liked it also...and the cartoons were hard to follow for a native
English speaker as well, intentionally so, I believe.

 

[James Britt]

I, too, have trouble finding things on ruby-doc, but I was always so
appreciative that ruby-doc even existed, that it never occurred to me to ask
for improvements!

I'm always open to suggestions, and user feedback is important to help
promote usability and value.

I'm redesigning the site so that the focus is on locating information
for specific tasks or areas of development. It should therefore be much
easier t find docs on, say, database integration, text processing, Web
development, and so on, as well as documents in various languages.

Thanks for all your work,

Oh, you're welcome. And big thanks to those creating and maintaining
documentation and documentation tools.


James

 

[Zach Dennis]

I'm always open to suggestions, and user feedback is important to help
promote usability and value.

I am very thankful and grateful for the site as well. And I use it all
the time! And I don't really hate the navigation, I just dislike it's
current inabilities to direct my eyes. Keep up the great work, I can't
wait to see the new design!!

Zach

 

[Josef 'Jupp' Schugt]

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trans. (T. Onoma) wrote:
| On Wednesday 29 December 2004 05:59 pm, Josef 'Jupp' Schugt wrote: |
| DGDATAT: Do good deeds and talk about them.
|
| I think that kind of goes without saying though. But take the point
| about the Documents page.

Of course there is *much* else to do than only writing software. I
thought that Thursday was focussing on the question which of quite a
number of tasks would result in the largest per effort increase of the
number of Ruby proponents - not necessarily of the number of programmers
using Ruby.

Two (perhaps extreme) examples of why these meanings 'popularity' are
quite different:

Plain C is not very popular as a programming language that your children
should learn but it is perhaps used for the largest number of programs
that are written - if one takes into account the many programs that run
on machines that most people would never call a computer but that by
definition are.

Visual Basic for Applications on the other hand is very popular but
compared to the number of installations only a tiny minority of all VBA
users actually use that language for programming that is worth the name
(i.e. anything that at least involves one logical decision).

Josef 'Jupp' Schugt
- --
Where on the ringworld does that 'Lord of the Rings' guy live?
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[Nicholas Van Weerdenburg]

Rather than comparisons to other languages, it would be better to offer
specific information on accomplishing various practical tasks. Perhaps
within a task-oriented section one could offer a comparison with another
language as a way of explaining A Ruby Way of doing something in terms a
Ruby newcomer might better understand, but what wins people over is the
specific knowledge that a tool will help them accomplish some
well-defined goal.

Point people to web development kits, database bindings, text-processing
libraries, XML tools, unit testing frameworks, distributed programming
code, and so on.

Language comparisons tend to get too abstract for most people, and are
often a source of goofy flame wars, as it seems nobody understands The
Other Language well enough to get it Just Right.

The site should be task-oriented, and unless the visitor is a language
buff or dilettante, the Ruby <-> #{language} stuff is academic.

A language attracts people looking to do something their current
language does not do well, if at all.

James

These are good points.

A classic text on sales "The New Strategic Selling" makes a startling
suggestion- don't worry about your competition. When you do, you often
1. aren't listening to your customer, and 2. aren't presenting your
product as a solution to what you heard from the customer.

The same probably applies here.

Nick

 

[Kevin Kleinfelter]

I assert that the programming environment may be more important in attracting new users than features of the language. I suspect
that few BASIC enthusiasts would fans of the language if their access were via Emacs and a VB shell.

I used to teach at a vocational/technical college. With Visual Basic or with BASIC on the old Apple 2, or even on the UCSD P-system,
I could turn the kids loose after an hour's lecture. FreeRIDE and RDT are good starts, but they have a long way to go before they
are bullet-proof and accessible to entry-level programmers.

Even to an old fart like me (I've been programming since 1976), the bother (for lack of a better term) of the tools available for
developing with Ruby may push me out of Ruby. I don't so much need an IDE per se, but I do need a bullet-proof debugger. I would
dearly like to see an environment that would let me add/change/delete lines of code in the middle of execution, without having to
terminate and restart the application I'm testing.

Maybe ActiveState could be induced to publish an interface to which the Ruby community could develop? I'm thinking that if
ActiveState won't provide Ruby support in Komodo, the Ruby community could provide support for Komodo. As the proverb goes, "If
Mohammend won't go to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammed."


Kevin Kleinfelter