Python 25 times as popular as Ruby !?

[Dan Doel]

So Ruby awareness will just grow on it's own without any effort from us?
It'll just happen? I don't think so.

Ruby awareness has already been growing without any specific advertising
plans, as far as I know.

I don't think anyone is contacting big players and proposing that Ruby be
used for things it's not suited for, and they shouldn't.
But what about proposing Ruby for things that it _is_ good for?

Apologies, I was taking a jab at a language I used to like a whole lot,
before I learned Ruby. Java had lots of advertising and big corporate
muscle behind it, which is partially why it's as big as it is today.

No, but why not visit other forums and make intelligent comments about
Ruby (backing them up with facts about the language). I think there are
many opportunities to do this in an appropriate way. Nobody's going to
pay much attention to a post on a forum that says "You should use Ruby
because it rox!", but if you suggest why Ruby makes sense for the given
application space it will be received positively.


It all depends on how the evangelizing is done. I would submit that we
_do_ need Ruby evangelists, but they need to evangelize 'nicely' and
intelligently. I know that a few years back there was an article going
around about how language evangelism is just terrible bad and must be
avoided at all costs, but I wonder if it caused us to go too far in the
other direction. "I'm not going to even mention Ruby as an option because
I don't want to be seen as an evangelist". The more people hear about
Ruby, the more likely it is that they'll try it.

We've all seen plenty of examples of superior commercial products that
died due to poor marketing.

So please _do_ write articles, post messages to other forums and even to
Slashdot. If we aim to be invisible, we will be.

I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about Ruby to other people. I think if
it's appropriate, you should bring it up. I myself have brought up Ruby
in forums I've posted to, like comp.lang.functional, and probably even
Slashdot.

I suppose when I said we dont' need evangelists, I really meant that we
don't need zealots. When there's a story about Java and someone goes in
and posts a random comment about how Python is better than Java, all it
does it make people angry. Feel free to evangelize as long as it's
appropriate, just don't go overboard and make people hate Ruby for its
evangelists/zealots.

Ruby will gain mass through people writing code and, of course, through
light evangelism. But I'm sure many of us already do that, so it's more
of a matter of time.

- Dan

 

[Avi Bryant]

Smalltalk is also dying or better becaming less and less attrictive.
Same as lisp where only Franz Lisp is still competitive in some areas.
In fact in commerical areas Smalltalk is much more dead then Eiffel.

Those of us (and there are quite a few) who use Smalltalk for
commercial development daily find such statements very amusing. As a
simple data point, there are currently at least five commercial
Smalltalk vendors (IBM, Cincom, Object Arts, Gemstone, Exept). That's
an awful lot of companies to be selling a dead language - I wonder how
they support all those development teams if nobody is buying their
product?

Ruby is not going to die just because it's not #1 most popular
scripting language, any more than Apple is going to die because they
only have a couple of % of the PC market. Network effects matter, but
Ruby is well beyond the critical mass it needs to survive. In fact,
Ruby is now too popular for my personal taste - I prefer the energy in
slightly smaller communities than Ruby's has become. The price of
success...

Avi

 

[Peter Hickman]

It's simple. The evolution depends on the size of the active
community. I don't mean students who pick it up for a course, or
people writting there first script, but people using it in a
professional (commerical) environment.

This is quite clearly a lie. At one point the number of people using
python could be counted on the fingers of one hand. But that community
built up over the years (and it was years, belive me) to achive it's
current state. By your logic such an unpopular language, as it was then,
shouldn't have made any inroads into the commercial environment.

That fact that it is 25 times more popular than ruby, by your own metic,
proves that being unpopular has not held it back. The fact that it is
used in commercial environments from such a starting point make a
mockery of your assertion.

You can't deny that there is a correlation between this and the
quality of the libraries (maybe not the core) and found/fixed bugs.

Maybe I should go over to comp.lang.python and see if you have written
'Perl is 25 times as popular as Python'. Which of course you should
write as Perl has vastly more libraries of high quality software than
python.

Other than trolling just what was the point of you message?

 

[Ged]

[Charles Comstock:]

I fully agree on all counts. I'll just mention, though, that RDoc
actually encourages introductory/usage/example documentation, *so long as
the developer wants to write it*. For example:

An idea I was wondering was if it might be possible to link unit tests
and RDoc.

It would work like this:

- The developer creates unit tests for their class, starting with the
simplest usages and then testing each facet of the code with unit
tests.

- There may be some extra, optional, notation for expressing how a
test would appear in the documentation. For example, a test may be
marked to be included in the main body of the documentatation, while
others are linked in a separate document. You could also categorise
the unit tests, and add other meta language.

- RDoc then processes these unit tests, formatting and indexing them,
and includes them with the final documentation.

I think this approach could make it easier for class writers to
produce extensive examples whithout much additional work.

 

[Martin DeMello]

Whats about cooperation instead of competition in the ruby world ?
The raa-installer vs. ruby-gems is one of the places where energy is
spend that could be used better. I also see lots of libraries in
competition to each other but not in competition to some python/perl
libraries, simply because they are to weak to be a competitor.

I have no problem with several projects exploring the same ecological
niche. What I do find mildly depressing is the number of ruby cookbook
projects out there, in various stages of development. (I even wrote to a
couple to see if they needed help, but never heard back from one, and
was told the other was on hiatus at the moment). Surely we should be
able to finish such a well-defined project within a month or two, with a
concerted community push.

Which brings up an interesting tangent - is there any ruby software that
would help coordinate such an effort?

martin

 

[Tim Hunter]

What can the Ruby community really do except continue to write Ruby code?
RubyForge says it hosts 152 projects.

I have 2 suggestions:

1. Host your Ruby projects on RubyForge. That gives folks 1 place to look
for Ruby code, and supports the efforts of those who support Ruby.

2. Buy Ruby books. Hal, Dave, etc. have mentioned that publishers are not
interested in bringing out new Ruby books when the current ones aren't
selling. I'm told that if you want to know where a man's heart is, look in
his checkbook. If we want Ruby to grow, spending a little money won't
hurt.

 

[Peter Hickman]

I have no problem with several projects exploring the same ecological
niche. What I do find mildly depressing is the number of ruby cookbook
projects out there, in various stages of development. (I even wrote to a
couple to see if they needed help, but never heard back from one, and
was told the other was on hiatus at the moment). Surely we should be
able to finish such a well-defined project within a month or two, with a
concerted community push.

Which brings up an interesting tangent - is there any ruby software that
would help coordinate such an effort?

martin

The TCL crew have a wiki in which various snippets and document can be
found. Quite a lot of the queries in the c.l.t news group get pointed to
wiki.tcl.tk/WhatEver which can be a very interesting source of information.

What is the problem with the cookbook sites? What is the stumbling
block, the effort to organise it, the lack of submissions, hosting?

Maybe if we knew why they failed then we could address that rather than
start yet another project.

 

[Gavin Sinclair]

I have no problem with several projects exploring the same ecological
niche. What I do find mildly depressing is the number of ruby cookbook
projects out there, in various stages of development. (I even wrote to a
couple to see if they needed help, but never heard back from one, and
was told the other was on hiatus at the moment). Surely we should be
able to finish such a well-defined project within a month or two, with a
concerted community push.

Which brings up an interesting tangent - is there any ruby software that
would help coordinate such an effort?

I started one such effort with submissions from the Sydney group,
which was never really advertised. It was based on PLEAC (which is
based on the Perl cookbook). I didn't like the PLEAC "code only"
approach, so thought another effort was justified (besides, all code
is sharable).

My effort has been dead for ages. I'd love to donate it to a good
home. Left alone, one day I would probably make a RubyForge project
out of it, but I'm waaaay too busy on other Ruby stuff to think about
that atm.

It's not a community push that would finish it; it's devotion from a
few core people and proofreading from a few more.

Cheers,
Gavin

http://www.soyabean.com.au/gavin/ruby-cookbook/ruby-cookbook/html/index.html

 

[gabriele renzi]

il Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:34:46 -0600, Charles Comstock

I certainly would probably rather do it in C# then Java. It's
interesting in the 2.0 spec for C# they are adding yield symantics,
anonymous method blocks and generics.

don't forget the ability to make the definition of a class in two
different places

 

[Tom Copeland]

I suppose when I said we dont' need evangelists, I really meant that we
don't need zealots. When there's a story about Java and someone goes in
and posts a random comment about how Python is better than Java, all it
does it make people angry. Feel free to evangelize as long as it's
appropriate, just don't go overboard and make people hate Ruby for its
evangelists/zealots.

Right on; seems like there's are opportunities for these things. If
there's a Slashdot article on Jabber, post a note about Jabber4R. If
there's an article on ImageMagick, post about RMagick, etc.

Yours,

Tom

 

[Nathaniel Talbott]

bottom line:
I'd like to be able to recommend Ruby for work projects and not get
'never heard of it' comments and questions about where would they find
Ruby programmers if I were hit by a bus.

The next time they ask you about the bus, you're welcome to give them
my email address

Seriously, I know so many _excellent_ programmers that would jump at
the chance to get paid for Ruby coding. I don't think buses (or trains
for that matter) are really a problem. Sure, they're not going to be
able to grab some "I coded a little app in VB" joe off the street, but
I see that as a feature of Ruby, not a bug. I find Ruby ability to be a
great measure of practical (pragmatic?) programming skills.


Nathaniel

<(><

 

[gabriele renzi]

il Mon, 2 Feb 2004 23:34:43 +0900, Gavin Sinclair

I started one such effort with submissions from the Sydney group,
which was never really advertised. It was based on PLEAC (which is
based on the Perl cookbook). I didn't like the PLEAC "code only"
approach, so thought another effort was justified (besides, all code
is sharable).

My effort has been dead for ages. I'd love to donate it to a good
home. Left alone, one day I would probably make a RubyForge project
out of it, but I'm waaaay too busy on other Ruby stuff to think about
that atm.

what about putting it on rubyforge.. but in the code snippets section
?

 

[Phil Tomson]

The next time they ask you about the bus, you're welcome to give them
my email address

;-) Are you still in Oregon?

Seriously, I know so many _excellent_ programmers that would jump at
the chance to get paid for Ruby coding. I don't think buses (or trains
for that matter) are really a problem.

I totally agree and I would add that any good programmer that has
experience in other languages and some OO background can pick up Ruby
and be productive in a few days. I was talking about management
perceptions of the language. We both would agree that these
perceptions are inaccurate, but they're still a barrier.

Phil

 

[Nathaniel Talbott]

;-) Are you still in Oregon?

Nope... but I still have in-laws there. I'm finishing up my current
(Ruby) project, and am looking for new ones, and the top two places I'm
looking are North Carolina (my current location) and Oregon. Even if I
telecommute, it's great to get work that occasionally brings me close
to family. So if you have any Oregon work, we should talk

I totally agree and I would add that any good programmer that has
experience in other languages and some OO background can pick up Ruby
and be productive in a few days.

The only qualifier I would make, from personal experience, is that a
good programmer coming to Ruby will still be missing two important
components after a few days - he won't be hooked up to the community,
and he won't be aware of the available libraries. Oh, and if he hasn't
used a language with closures, he'll miss a significant portion of
Ruby's power until they click with him. It sounds like a sales pitch,
but I would say that it is critical for a commercial project to at
least have a ruby expert on call, if not on the team. What's a Ruby
expert? Hard to quantify, but I'd say a minimum of one
publicly-available Ruby project, and one year of reading the ruby-talk
list.

I was talking about management
perceptions of the language. We both would agree that these
perceptions are inaccurate, but they're still a barrier.

Perceptions are, indeed, tough. I was just talking to a friend (one of
those great programmers who would love to be doing Ruby), and he was
saying that the consulting company he works for has 12 potential
clients that don't care what technology is used to implement their
projects. So of course, the salesman is recommending... .NET!?!?!? The
salesman's justification is that he wants to use the best thing for his
clients, and his perception is that C# and .NET are the best. How do we
deal with that? I'm not sure, but I know that the more Ruby code that
gets laid down, publicly or privately, that's works well and meets
people's needs, the better it will get.


Nathaniel

<(><

 

[Martin DeMello]

It's not a community push that would finish it; it's devotion from a
few core people and proofreading from a few more.

I believe with the right framework, a community push *could* finish it.
By the right framework, I mean something that would make it trivial for
someone to load up a webpage, see a precise and categorised list of
parts needing to be done, and be able to fill in a missing task, or
perhaps add some notes to a wikipage for that task. A wiki is not
suitable for the main organisation, note - it's too unstructured. And
the varioouus faq-o-matic programs I've seen, where people contribute
questions and other people answer them, don't focus enough on the big
picture. Maybe something like bugzilla could be adapted for the task -
not familiar enough with that.

Another advantage is that it'd let us easily pool togeher code from all
the existing cookbook projects out there, and would provide a natural
framework within which we could extend this beyond the confines of the
perl cookbook.

martin

 

[Martin DeMello]

Seriously, I know so many _excellent_ programmers that would jump at
the chance to get paid for Ruby coding. I don't think buses (or trains
for that matter) are really a problem. Sure, they're not going to be

I think it was Paul Graham who defined a really attractive language as
one that you'd take a job coding in irrespective of the actual project.
It was someone in the lisp community at any rate, but ruby definitely
fits the bill

martin

 

[Gavin Sinclair]

il Mon, 2 Feb 2004 23:34:43 +0900, Gavin Sinclair
<[email protected]> ha scritto::

what about putting it on rubyforge.. but in the code snippets section
?

A cookbook should be downloadable in one piece for offline viewing.

Gavin

 

[Gavin Sinclair]

I believe with the right framework, a community push *could* finish it.
By the right framework, I mean something that would make it trivial for
someone to load up a webpage, see a precise and categorised list of
parts needing to be done, and be able to fill in a missing task, or
perhaps add some notes to a wikipage for that task. A wiki is not
suitable for the main organisation, note - it's too unstructured. And
the varioouus faq-o-matic programs I've seen, where people contribute
questions and other people answer them, don't focus enough on the big
picture. Maybe something like bugzilla could be adapted for the task -
not familiar enough with that.

Another advantage is that it'd let us easily pool togeher code from all
the existing cookbook projects out there, and would provide a natural
framework within which we could extend this beyond the confines of the
perl cookbook.

I'll take that as a 'yes', then? Cool, I'll send you the code and
data soon I think a manual submission process is suitable, with
the maintainer updating the data files. But that's just in this case.
You can decide that when you recieve it

Cheers,
Gavin

 

[Josef 'Jupp' SCHUGT]

Hi!

* Martin Weber:

I just say ``BSD is dead.''

The logos say it all:

Windows: Everyone sees everthing, easy to break.
BSD: Governed by the devil. Cannot be very alive.
Linux: Clumsy and persistent as a Penguin.

*g*

Josef 'Jupp' SCHUGT

 

[Josef 'Jupp' SCHUGT]

Hi!

* Dan Doel:

After all, Ruby isn't a religion,

Sounds like the most important difference between Ruby and Perl.

and it isn't in a contest with other languages.

There is an historical precedence case of what happens if a
programming language does not take place in that contest:
'Plankalkuel' (plan calculus) by Konrad Zuse.

Konrad Zuse built the first mechanical computer worked, the first
relay computer and the first cathode tube computer. No programming
language did exist jet so he invented a programming language of his
own that had many traits of a modern programming language.

Most people (including most Germans) don't even know that this
programming language did exist. This is because it never took part in
the contest. Zuse lived in the Third Reich and because of this had no
chance to present Plankalkuel to a wider audience.

Ruby itself shows this problem of communicating as well: The time
during which all documentation was in Japanese de facto meant that
very few people outside Japan even knew that it existed.

Anyway. I do not think that a factor of 25 is *that* much. One should
not underestimate positive feedback. The more people use Ruby the
more learn about it the more start to use it.

Josef 'Jupp' SCHUGT