David - we can start a flame war, all rather pointless and doesn't do you or
I or anybody else any favours. Or we can simply agree to shake hands and
have a "virtual" beer.
Or you could ignore him. *I* certainly found comments like "It takes at most five minutes over a slow connection of clicking around to figure that out on the ruby-lang website, hopefully much less after
the revamp, and at most 30 seconds for anyone with mediocre google skills to get the basic points right." to be not only annoyingly condescending, but quite opposite of my experience, which seems to involve spending a lot of time finding documentation misplaced, dreadfully obscure, or just plain missing, and discovering new and different ways for those oh-so-easy installers to fail.
I think he's probably wrong in believing that "You don't represent any significant majority of Ruby users on any platform in my opinion." You certainly are representing my opinions pretty accurately. On the other hand, if he's right, then Ruby might well be going down the incoherent-and-eventually-irrelevant path. I see there being a danger of that, but I don't think it's at all inevitable, yet, thank goodness.
I think you've taken by initial post on this thread to be a real moan, when
what I was really trying to do was simply put forward one user's perspective
(ie. mine) of how Ruby was being presented to potential users. For what
it's worth, I think your point "Programming languages and tools are not
end-user software." is quite wrong.
I agree. I have and use Ruby because I want to build programs and tools for myself...in Ruby. The time I spend having to poop around with recompiling Ruby, reinstalling Ruby, re-downloading source for Ruby, debugging Ruby's installers, is wasted time. I wasted something like three or four hours trying to get readline support working with irb, IIRC.
The only installer tool I've used for Ruby or Ruby-related material that has NOT errored out or installed something incorrectly is...Apple's standard OSX installer. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, right now, only Ruby 1.8.2 is available in that installer. OTOH, it includes Readline, Gems, Rails, TclTk, and the RI documentation (and not just all using the same installer, but in the same package! Woo hoo!), so I may just revert backwards to it, since Gem/Rails has not yet installed correctly in three tries (one of those tries was on a brand-new freshly installed OSX 10.3, no less), I have to install Ruby and Readline by downloading and compiling source (the instructions for using CVS for that failed on the second command), Rails with Gem, and and I still have no idea why RDoc has completely failed to document any of the core material. I've read over the stuff that came with the source code, and done what it told me, and still, trying to get information on, say, "Array" just gets me some useless chit-chat about something called YARV.
I'm sure if I spent more time not trying to actually get work done, I could get that fixed, by asking questions here. But I have a copy of Pickaxe, so I just use that. If I have to spend time working on my car instead of driving to work, then my car isn't very good. If I have to spend time working on my computer instead of using it to get work done, then my computer's not very good. And if I have to spend time sending messages to Ruby-Talk trying to find out how to get Ruby to work instead of programming, then Ruby's not very good.
I'll tell friends who are programmers about Ruby, but I haven't yet recommended it to anybody. It's too unstable, too undocumented, too hard to use. It's too young. I've completely shelved any Rails development because hours of searching, and an inquiry posted here, have revealed the absence of critical documentation for database design. I just don't have the time to join a whole new mailing list and see if I can coax somebody to document exactly what *all* of Rails' assumptions about the underlying database are. I've already been much the same thing with RubyCocoa, and now THAT is actually working as expected, and I'm getting things out that work, so I'm just going to stick with the system I've got that's running, and put off projects that want Rails as long as possible, and hope it's more mature when I come back around to looking at it.
I think the biggest difference between Ruby and Groovy is that there's somebody who "owns" Ruby and is still actively (and effectively!) involved: Matz. I do wish Ruby were a bit more specific. Parentheses are sometimes but not always optional, and the like. (shudder) But it seems to be headed in the right direction, and hopefully it won't be too long before the amount of time one must spend working ON Ruby instead of working WITH Ruby drops to nearly nothing.
I also agree with you, Glenn, in that I don't think these problems are fundamental problems with Ruby itself, or its tools, or its community. The problem is with people who don't recognize or admit that these ARE problems, and would try to deny or excuse them. These issues can be, and are being, resolved, but only as long as they're recognized as issues that NEED to be resolved.
Pointing out weaknesses in something to its fan base doesn't always make you friends, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. Thanks, Glenn; hopefully your observations will help Ruby grow even stronger.
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On Feb 19, 2006, at 11:17, Glenn Smith wrote:
...as well as perhaps