Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity

ruby-talk
1

I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder what we can do to accelerate its adoption.

I think we've all seen superior technologies go extinct due to bad marketing/perception--sadly, perception can be more important than reality at times.

I think at a minimum, we need these:

1. a more formal release process--this could be as simple as documenting what level of testing goes into changes to the stable vs dev branches before they are committed to CVS.

2. a bug tracking system where we can report and view bugs--bugzilla is overkill, maybe something simpler like trac should be considered.

3. last but not least, online docs on Ruby's primary website (not 3rd-party websites) that is similar to those provided by PostgreSQL and Python. Maybe we can volunteer to create 'official' ruby docs to be hosted on ruby's primary website. Preferably using a popular documentation format that does not use frames like these:

http://python.org/doc/2.4/
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/interactive/index.html

When ruby's primary website lists ruby 1.4.6 docs for download and says ruby 1.6 docs are not yet ready (as of Dec 28, 2004), it can give the wrong impression about Ruby's current pace of activity: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/20020107.html

This is particularly sad and misleading because matz, nobu, shugo and many others are very actively working on improving ruby daily (we can see this in the daily cvs commits). And it doesn't provide any clues to newcomers/evaluators about the vibrant ruby community that is frantically creating new ruby projects to rubyforge.

Anyone else think these few changes can make a big difference in how ruby is perceived, and consequently chosen over other languages?

2

Hi!

I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder what
we can do to accelerate its adoption.

I'm reading, learning and writing some stuff about Ruby now. I think this
can make more people know and use it, but I think we don't need to worry so
much about make it so popular.

Of course, will be cool to people use there, but I already saw some
languages that said "hey, let's become a really hype" and

a) their community became fragmented and confuse.
b) the language itself became confuse.

So, I think the way it's going it's perfect, steping on solid ground and
moving very solid. People will know about that, on a way or another. :slight_smile:

Best regards,

- ----------------------------
Eustáquio "TaQ" Rangel
eustaquiorangel@yahoo.com

Usuário GNU/Linux no. 224050

3

online docs on Ruby's primary website (not
3rd-party websites) that is similar to those provided by PostgreSQL and
Python. Maybe we can volunteer to create 'official' ruby docs to be
hosted on ruby's primary website.
When ruby's primary website lists ruby 1.4.6 docs for download and says
ruby 1.6 docs are not yet ready (as of Dec 28, 2004), it can give the
wrong impression about Ruby's current pace of activity:
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/20020107.html

I agree that as I was getting into Ruby, one of the big turn-offs was
that it always looked like an abandoned project!

Even just two days ago, I went to RubyCentral.org (the people that put
on the Ruby Conference and have the Ruby Codefest Grant program) --
offering to make a financial contribution, and what do I get from
their "contact us" link?
http://www.rubycentral.org/cgi-bin/submit.rb?css=base -- 404 not found

It seems for MOST Ruby-users, Ruby is a hobby, a curiosity, something
to learn to learn "another language". Well-meaning people set up a
helpful website, but when their day job takes over their life, the
hobby project gets abandoned.

Links of Ruby websites always seem unfinished and ugly.

Rails is encouraging : http://www.rubyonrails.org/

I hope there are more people able to follow-through on their interest in Ruby.
I hope people can collaborate to make a few GREAT Ruby websites,
instead of dozens of unfinished broken ones.
... also ...
I hope Ruby Central Inc becomes a non-profit so some companies and
people can make a tax-deductible contribution to Ruby development.
It would be amazing what one full-time Ruby "teacher and evangelist"
could do if they had good webdesign skills.
I hope Pragmatic Programmers keep writing great books on Ruby, and are
financially rewarded enough to encourage others to do the same.

4

I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder what
we can do to accelerate its adoption.

Why, what do you hope to achieve?

I think we've all seen superior technologies go extinct due to bad
marketing/perception--sadly, perception can be more important than
reality at times.

The technologies that went extinct were tied to companies that died or
abandoned them. There is no danger of that with Ruby.

So if this is the only reason to worry about adoption, instead of just
improving Ruby for ourselves, I think it's wasted effort.

Remember this, too: the more useful Ruby is for those who use it, the more
useful Ruby is for those who would use it.

···

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 10:10:42 +0000, Thursday wrote:

--
Neil Stevens - neil@hakubi.us
"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who
are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
                                                 -- Albert Einstein(?)

5

Thursday wrote:

I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder what we can do to accelerate its adoption.

More O'Reilly books please :slight_smile: There are currently 30 or so (or is it 100?) for Perl, probably 10 for Python, and only 1-2 for Ruby.

Getting published by O'Reilly is nice because: a) it's one of the most famous, so it becomes sort of a barometer; b) Safari; c) short copyright period, so who knows in 5 years we will have several free Ruby books available.

So please write for O'Reilly, or write to O'Reilly requesting more Ruby books. There are lots of topics that can be covered and I think it has been discussed in this list fairly recently.

Regards,
dave

6

Thursday ha scritto:
:

1. a more formal release process--this could be as simple as documenting what level of testing goes into changes to the stable vs dev branches before they are committed to CVS.

just my 2cents on this:
I think this is really a worthwhile goal.
I'd like to have a slightly more formal process like
- set a not huge timing for the each .point release (i.e. 4 months). I'd like this to be short, pointing people to 'stable snapshot' does not give the same feeling that "use 1.8.3".
- Put someone in charge of it.
- After a fixed period (i.e. after 2 months) declare real feature freeze (some stuff could change in this period, think of RSS::Parser/Maker,cvs.rb,Tk changes) and just fix bugs.
- Let hackers mess up the next version in peace safely :slight_smile:

Well, this mostly just requires a release manager, as matz pointed out some time ago. Noone candidate him/herself, anyway. Would someone do it now, please? :slight_smile:

2. a bug tracking system where we can report and view bugs--bugzilla is overkill, maybe something simpler like trac should be considered.

the bug tracking system ATM is here:
http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?group_id=426
probably this need more visibility.
Would it be possible to add a link on the main rubyforge page with something like "report a bug in Ruby"?
Could this also be put on the main ruby page?

7

Thursday wrote:

I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder what we can do to accelerate its adoption.

Read and reflect upon ??Crossing the Chasm?? by Moore and
??The Innovator's Dilemma?? by Christensen

···

--
Bil Kleb, Hampton, Virginia
http://fun3d.larc.nasa.gov

8

Thursday wrote:

I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder what we can do to accelerate its adoption.

1. a more formal release process

2. a bug tracking system where we can report and view bugs

3. last but not least, online docs on Ruby's primary website

I think that the following agenda will be better:

1. DGDATAT
2. DGDATAT
3. DGDATAT

DGDATAT: Do good deeds and talk about them.

By that I mean that the best way of making popular *any* programming
language is not meeting some formal requirements on how the language is
developed and documented but rather by writing good "everybody wants to
have" software and libraries in Ruby and talk about them whenever you
see the slightest chance someone may be interested in them.

When trying to talk people into the use of Ruby I often face responses
like these:

"Is there a Ruby library to do X?"
"Has someone written a Ruby program to do Y?"

Josef 'Jupp' Schugt

···

--
Where on the ringworld does that 'Lord of the Rings' guy live?

9

I'd like to see http://www.ruby-lang.org/en cleaned up to immediately
convey to new users whether they want to investigate more or not. I
had business cards once described as needing to impress in the 1/2
second someone looks at it before tossing it in the garbage. A
web-site, I think, needs to follow the same principles.

In that vain, I'd like to see:
1. focus on introduction, tutorials, and documentation- having news
dominate the body is not ideal- this is where you capture new people,
and the news is meaningless to most of them.
2. a marketing blurb right at the top that's more detailed. It should
give a sense of what Ruby is, and why I'd be in interested in going
further into it. Good marketing is concise communication, not mindless
hype, and, there is nothing wrong about being excited about a great
thing. "The power and beauty of Smalltalk mixed with the hard-nosed
practicality of Perl, Ruby is an ultra-productive Smalltalk and Perl
inspired dynamic programming language that closes the gap between
thought and code. Almost as important, Ruby makes programming fun
again."
3. a "Get Started in 10 Minutes Tutorial Link". A canonical tutorial
aka Python would be nice. Ideally, there is a 10 minute one and a 4
hour one.
4. a prominent "Download Now" link at the top.

The python site was recently cleaned up, and while still butt-ugly, it
is nicely focused.

Nick

···

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 19:11:48 +0900, Thursday <nospam@nospam.nospam.nospam.nospam.org> wrote:

I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder what
we can do to accelerate its adoption.

I think we've all seen superior technologies go extinct due to bad
marketing/perception--sadly, perception can be more important than
reality at times.

I think at a minimum, we need these:

1. a more formal release process--this could be as simple as documenting
what level of testing goes into changes to the stable vs dev branches
before they are committed to CVS.

2. a bug tracking system where we can report and view bugs--bugzilla is
overkill, maybe something simpler like trac should be considered.

3. last but not least, online docs on Ruby's primary website (not
3rd-party websites) that is similar to those provided by PostgreSQL and
Python. Maybe we can volunteer to create 'official' ruby docs to be
hosted on ruby's primary website. Preferably using a popular
documentation format that does not use frames like these:

http://python.org/doc/2.4/
PostgreSQL: Documentation: 7.4: PostgreSQL 7.4.30 Documentation

When ruby's primary website lists ruby 1.4.6 docs for download and says
ruby 1.6 docs are not yet ready (as of Dec 28, 2004), it can give the
wrong impression about Ruby's current pace of activity:
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/20020107.html

This is particularly sad and misleading because matz, nobu, shugo and
many others are very actively working on improving ruby daily (we can
see this in the daily cvs commits). And it doesn't provide any clues to
newcomers/evaluators about the vibrant ruby community that is
frantically creating new ruby projects to rubyforge.

Anyone else think these few changes can make a big difference in how
ruby is perceived, and consequently chosen over other languages?

--
Nicholas Van Weerdenburg

10

Thursday wrote:

I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but
wonder what we can do to accelerate its adoption.

Hi all, I'm new to this list. I'm a long time (well, 1-2 years)
Python programmer and advocate, but I've gotta say I'm really sold
on Ruby now. What triggered my interest was Ruby on Rails.

I've always thought of Ruby as a language too close to Python and
not particularly intriguing enough to be worth my time. But now I
see things quite differently. I'm not the kind of programmer that
uses only one language, so I can see myself using both Python and
Ruby, mostly interchangeable, but Ruby on Rails seems to be
definitely a wiser choice for most of my web projects now.

One thing that has always kept me away from Ruby was its highly
evident Perlish syntax. I like the conservative aspect of Python's
syntax very much, and it was difficult for me to accept some of
the freedoms that Ruby gives. But I'm slowing changing my mind.

Surely inline regexes are heathenish but they are very practical
and Ruby makes them readable enough. I now think Ruby is able to
mantain the code harmony (I like this term) and clarity while
offering all these nice syntactic sugars.

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.

Good to be a part of this growing community.

···

--

11

Hi all, I got to this discussion really late, but I have some ideas.

Here's what web-related things I would suggest to accelerate Ruby's popularity:

* A central "portal" site geared towards people who are brand new to Ruby. This central site's main page should have at most 6 "elements" on it, and should show them all with no scrolling. The way Google's main page does things is almost perfect. I'd lay things out like:

About | Search: ____________________ [go]
Ruby |

···

----------------------------------------------
Docs | Downloads | Libraries / Software

I think a big, prominent "search" box is a necessity. It wouldn't even need to run a search engine on any site either, it could simply connect to google and search only a small subset of Ruby sites. It's just that you often know what you want, but don't know where it would be. Is "bugs" under documentation or "about Ruby"? Is "CVS access" under "About Ruby" or "Downloads"? You can't possibly show everything people are interested in on the main page, so don't try, just make it easy for them to find it.

I would suggest that each one of those sections only contain 1 link, and that the page it links to can contain more information, say:

About Ruby:
   * What is Ruby? (Intro from Matz)
   * Ruby's License
   * How does Ruby compare to Python, Perl, PHP, Smalltalk...
   * Ruby stats (how many downloads, how many projects,
       date of latest release, number of developers,
       mailing list size, age of Ruby...)
   * CVS access
   * Mailing lists
   * Bugs

Docs:
   Docs could either be a direct link to ruby-doc.org or could be a page
   on the same server. Either way, I think the docs page should be
   another simple portal:
   * Quick intro to Ruby for beginning programmers
   * Quick intro to Ruby for advanced programmers
   * Ruby API & Std Lib Documentation
   * Ruby language reference

Downloads:
   * Windows one-click installer
   * OS X disk image
   * Tarball
   * Info on packages for other OSes (Debian, Gentoo, Solaris, ...)
   * Link to CVS tree

Libraries / Software:
   * RAA
   * Rubyforge

I think three of the biggest problems with Ruby's websites now are:
1. inconsistent look and feel between the various ruby-related domains ruby-lang.org vs. rubyforge vs. ruby-doc.org vs. rubygarden vs. RAA. I know each of these sites are run by individuals, and that they all have their own reasons for running them, and their own interests. I just think it would help the community if they all agreed on a standard look and feel. That way, if the main ruby site linked to ruby-doc.org directly for documentation, new visitors wouldn't wonder whether the documentation was official or not.

2. Duplicated information on every site. RubyForge has a link to report a bug in Ruby itself, ruby-doc.org has a link to download Ruby directly, etc. This is confusing. I think ruby-doc.org shouldn't have a download page at all, and should instead point all downloads to one central download page. I think RubyForge should concentrate on Ruby libraries and apps, and not on Ruby the language.

3. Most ruby sites home pages are geared towards long-time Ruby users, and not newbies. I don't think there's any good reason for that. Long time users will either have bookmarks or know how to find what they want in one or two clicks. New users are probably overwhelmed.

Finally, there's the issue of news and discussion. Easily 90% of the screen space on www.ruby-lang.org is dedicated to news, but the last bit of news was on Christmas. If news comes in so slowly that there might not be news for 3 weeks, it shouldn't have such a prominent place. I think news and discussion should be somewhat buried in the sites. Long-time Ruby users will know where to find it, and interested newcomers will be able to find it, but it won't distract newbies who are just trying to figure out "what the heck is this Ruby thing?"

Now, I'm pretty good at laying out info, but I don't have any skills at real graphic design, so I can't really volunteer to design anything I'm suggesting. I just think it would be nice to see.

Ben

12

How ironic that your quote essentially contradicts you.

T.

···

On Tuesday 28 December 2004 06:36 am, Neil Stevens wrote:

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 10:10:42 +0000, Thursday wrote:
> I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder what
> we can do to accelerate its adoption.

Why, what do you hope to achieve?

> I think we've all seen superior technologies go extinct due to bad
> marketing/perception--sadly, perception can be more important than
> reality at times.

The technologies that went extinct were tied to companies that died or
abandoned them. There is no danger of that with Ruby.

So if this is the only reason to worry about adoption, instead of just
improving Ruby for ourselves, I think it's wasted effort.

Remember this, too: the more useful Ruby is for those who use it, the more
useful Ruby is for those who would use it.

--
Neil Stevens - neil@hakubi.us
"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who
are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
-- Albert Einstein(?)

13

Hi --

Even just two days ago, I went to RubyCentral.org (the people that put
on the Ruby Conference and have the Ruby Codefest Grant program) --
offering to make a financial contribution, and what do I get from
their "contact us" link?
http://www.rubycentral.org/cgi-bin/submit.rb?css=base -- 404 not found

Whoops -- I seem to have accidentally archived the submit form along
with some other CGI stuff from a finished project! Thanks for the
report.

I hope Ruby Central Inc becomes a non-profit so some companies and
people can make a tax-deductible contribution to Ruby development.

It is! They can! We were granted 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in
August, 2004. (See ruby-talk:108189.)

Our PayPal account is: acct@rubycentral.org. We're happy to take
contributions directly there, or if you know anyone who wants more
information first, or who is interested in the possibility of
sponsoring a specific project, they can contact one or more of the
directors directly. (That's me, Chad Fowler (chad@chadfowler.com),
and Rich Kilmer (rich@infoether.com).)

David

···

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Miles Keaton wrote:

--
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net

14

That way it would be more likely to be able to use Ruby at work.

···

On 2004-12-28 12:34:56, Neil Stevens wrote:

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 10:10:42 +0000, Thursday wrote:

I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder what
we can do to accelerate its adoption.

Why, what do you hope to achieve?

15

Hello gabriele,

Thursday ha scritto:
:

1. a more formal release process--this could be as simple as documenting
what level of testing goes into changes to the stable vs dev branches
before they are committed to CVS.

just my 2cents on this:
I think this is really a worthwhile goal.
I'd like to have a slightly more formal process like
- set a not huge timing for the each .point release (i.e. 4 months). I'd
like this to be short, pointing people to 'stable snapshot' does not
give the same feeling that "use 1.8.3".

I hope we do not - at least with the current ruby development process.

You can't use binary extensions that are compiled against 1.8.1 with
1.8.2 even when the version number suggests this. So as long as the
core team is not willing/able to garantee API stability between patch
releases the situation gets worse.

There are already to much projects out there that are simply out of
date and do not work very well because of the backward compatibility
problem.

···

- Put someone in charge of it.
- After a fixed period (i.e. after 2 months) declare real feature freeze
(some stuff could change in this period, think of
RSS::Parser/Maker,cvs.rb,Tk changes) and just fix bugs.

--
Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
Lothar Scholz http://www.ruby-ide.com
CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's

16

Hello Neil,

I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder what
we can do to accelerate its adoption.

Why, what do you hope to achieve?

More people means more project and more extensions.
Bugs are found much earlier and are fixed earlier.

And a more successfull language (in commercial sense) will
result in much more university projects that do some nice
experimental and sophisticated stuff. Having people too use
ruby in ther Ph.D thesis is important. But since they now that
this thesis is important for finding a job later they use
java and other mainstream languages.

And yes, some people like it to make money with ruby and work
8 hours a day with ruby and not java.

···

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 10:10:42 +0000, Thursday wrote:

--
Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
Lothar Scholz http://www.ruby-ide.com
CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's

17

Good idea, done:

http://rubyforge.org/

Is there a better way to lay out that front page to make stuff like that
more visible?

Thanks,

tom

···

On Tue, 2004-12-28 at 11:36, gabriele renzi wrote:

the bug tracking system ATM is here:
http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?group_id=426
probably this need more visibility.
Would it be possible to add a link on the main rubyforge page with
something like "report a bug in Ruby"?
Could this also be put on the main ruby page?

18

Neil Stevens wrote:

···

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 10:10:42 +0000, Thursday wrote:

I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder what we can do to accelerate its adoption.

Why, what do you hope to achieve?

I hope to avoid encountering the "you can't use Ruby on this project because we've never heard of it and nobody else here knows it and lets stick with a well-known language" argument.

Availability of workforce is frequently viewed as more important than the elegance or technical features of a programming language.

19

You have a point. Comments from Slashdot posters is what motivated me to look
at Ruby. The comments I saw were something like, "if you like Python, you
will love Ruby". I hear/see that alot. The key point is that the comments
were not made in threads where Ruby was the topic. They were just thrown in
by Ruby enthusiasts.

I agree with many of the comments about the website, too. In particular,
Miles' comments quite accurately paralleled my experience.

darren

···

On Wednesday 29 December 2004 4:59 pm, Josef 'Jupp' Schugt wrote:

Thursday wrote:
> I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder
> what we can do to accelerate its adoption.
>
> 1. a more formal release process
>
> 2. a bug tracking system where we can report and view bugs
>
> 3. last but not least, online docs on Ruby's primary website

I think that the following agenda will be better:

1. DGDATAT
2. DGDATAT
3. DGDATAT

DGDATAT: Do good deeds and talk about them.

By that I mean that the best way of making popular *any* programming
language is not meeting some formal requirements on how the language is
developed and documented but rather by writing good "everybody wants to
have" software and libraries in Ruby and talk about them whenever you
see the slightest chance someone may be interested in them.

When trying to talk people into the use of Ruby I often face responses
like these:

"Is there a Ruby library to do X?"
"Has someone written a Ruby program to do Y?"

Josef 'Jupp' Schugt

20

I think that kind of goes without saying though. But take the point about the
Documents page. It is really quite disappointing to see things like that.
this is all it is:

# Downloadable documents

    * Ruby 1.4.6 Reference Manual
    * English reference manual for Ruby 1.6 is not yet prepared. See Ruby 1.6
Library reference online.
    * Ruby-doc.org accumulates Ruby-related documents widely.
    * Recently, stdlib-doc project accumulates RDoc-based documents for Ruby
standard libraries widely.

Last update on March 21, 2004 15:37
«Ruby CVS Repository Guide Top Conferences»

T.

···

On Wednesday 29 December 2004 05:59 pm, Josef 'Jupp' Schugt wrote:

Thursday wrote:
> I think Ruby's popularity is growing, but I can't help but wonder
> what we can do to accelerate its adoption.
>
> 1. a more formal release process
>
> 2. a bug tracking system where we can report and view bugs
>
> 3. last but not least, online docs on Ruby's primary website

I think that the following agenda will be better:

1. DGDATAT
2. DGDATAT
3. DGDATAT

DGDATAT: Do good deeds and talk about them.