I love Ruby - But how bright is Ruby's Future?

ruby-talk
81

If I have a quoted symbol, i.e. :'some symbol' then when I dump the YAML for it and then load the results I don't get back the symbol I put in, but get an extra set of escaped quotes. The following irb session shows this:

irb(main):014:0> YAML.dump(:'some symbol')
=> "--- :\"some symbol\"\n"
irb(main):015:0> YAML.load("--- :\"some symbol\"\n")
=> :"\"some symbol\""
irb(main):016:0> YAML.load("--- :\"some symbol\"\n").class
=> Symbol

~> ruby -v
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [powerpc-darwin8.6.0]

I was a bit surprised it wasn't using something like
  ruby/symbol 'some symbol'
to do the encoding.

Dave.

82

Matthew Smillie wrote:

For big values of long - your guess is likely as good as mine, but I'd
pick Lisp. Four decades and still going strong.

Actually, Lispnik Paul Graham is "redesigning" Lisp to last 100 years
(from now). Do a search for "Paul Graham" and "ARC" to see what he's
proposing. It hasn't moved a lot recently; perhaps he's leaning towards
jumping on the Ruby bandwagon. :slight_smile:

And as a result, "business acceptance" in its traditional sense is
becoming less relevant to language design because typical businesses
are contributing less to language design; essentially nothing in
direct terms, and even their marginal contribution of providing jobs
to direct contributors (i.e. jobs not involving those contributions)
is proportionally lower than it ever has been.

Hmmm ... well, maybe business didn't contribute much to the design of
*Ruby*, but C, C++, C#, Java, Visual Basic, APL and Fortran were
designed by businesses!

···

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com

83

If I have a quoted symbol, i.e. :'some symbol' then when I dump the YAML for
it and then load the results I don't get back the symbol I put in, but get an
extra set of escaped quotes. The following irb session shows this:

i don't see the problem:

   harp:~ > ruby -r yaml -e' qs = YAML.load(YAML.dump(:"foo bar")); p qs; p qs.class; p VERSION '
   :"foo bar"
   Symbol
   "1.8.4"

you are just confusing yourself with irb/inspect

irb(main):014:0> YAML.dump(:'some symbol')
=> "--- :\"some symbol\"\n"

      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
      this is the output of String.inspect - not the literal string

try

   harp:~ > irb -r yaml
   irb(main):001:0> dumped = YAML.dump(:'some symbol')
   => "--- :\"some symbol\"\n"
   irb(main):002:0> YAML.load dumped
   => :"some symbol"
   irb(main):003:0> YAML.load(dumped).class
   => Symbol

regards.

-a

···

On Wed, 7 Jun 2006, Dave Baldwin wrote:
--
suffering increases your inner strength. also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama

84

How did this thread get hijacked?

I'm changing it back.

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

85

Not to hijack the thread, but make a casual comment regarding Arc. Paul Graham has done a lot for the Lisp community, however, he's basically gone in and said "look how great lisp is" while in the same breath stating, "but wait, ignore it, I'm redesigning it making it better, but I don't have anything yet, stay tuned". Which essentially killed a lot of the forward momentum and acceptance of lisp. He's not exactly someone I'd point to if I were trying to make the point you're trying to make.

···

On 8-Jun-06, at 12:33 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

Matthew Smillie wrote:

For big values of long - your guess is likely as good as mine, but I'd
pick Lisp. Four decades and still going strong.

Actually, Lispnik Paul Graham is "redesigning" Lisp to last 100 years
(from now). Do a search for "Paul Graham" and "ARC" to see what he's
proposing. It hasn't moved a lot recently; perhaps he's leaning towards
jumping on the Ruby bandwagon. :slight_smile:

--
Jeremy Tregunna
jtregunna@blurgle.ca

"One serious obstacle to the adoption of good programming languages is the notion that everything has to be sacrificed for speed. In computer languages as in life, speed kills." -- Mike Vanier

86

Matthew Smillie wrote:

For big values of long - your guess is likely as good as mine, but I'd
pick Lisp. Four decades and still going strong.

Actually, Lispnik Paul Graham is "redesigning" Lisp to last 100 years
(from now). Do a search for "Paul Graham" and "ARC" to see what he's
proposing. It hasn't moved a lot recently; perhaps he's leaning towards
jumping on the Ruby bandwagon. :slight_smile:

I actually pointed towards Paul Graham earlier in the thread, though not about Arc in particular. I've been watching Arc for a while, and I think I'll reserve judgement until it actually appears. My bet is that PG's been sidetracked by the spam issue in much the same way that Knuth got sidetracked by TeX while writing the Art of Computer Programming.

And as a result, "business acceptance" in its traditional sense is
becoming less relevant to language design because typical businesses
are contributing less to language design; essentially nothing in
direct terms, and even their marginal contribution of providing jobs
to direct contributors (i.e. jobs not involving those contributions)
is proportionally lower than it ever has been.

Hmmm ... well, maybe business didn't contribute much to the design of
*Ruby*, but C, C++, C#, Java, Visual Basic, APL and Fortran were
designed by businesses!

Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (and their colleagues and collaborators) may disagree with your assertion that they are 'businesses' rather than 'people'. APL emerged out of Harvard's proto-CS department (not really a business), though the name of its creator eludes me. I'd also be willing to bet that there was an individual at IBM directly responsible for designing Fortran (though this hunch is based more on the nature of Fortran and the size and nature of the industry at that point in history than any concrete knowledge).

This was exactly the point I'm trying to make: if a business wants something which conforms to their needs, they need to directly invest in the process of its creation. Such as by hiring people like those listed above to design languages.

In any case, it wasn't the Suns, Microsofts, and IBMs of the world that I was talking about, but those companies who aren't in the business of creating languages and tools, but merely sit on the sidelines and say "but is it Acceptable to Business? I won't let you use it unless it's Acceptable to Business." Their contribution to projects like Ruby (or even Java, if you include its community process) has always been the marginal one of providing incidental employment to people who made direct contributions in their spare time.

That marginal contribution has recently been dropping in importance for a number of reasons, so it really shouldn't surprise these businesses that projects to which they make essentially no contribution don't really reflect their needs.

What I'm trying to point out is that standing on the sidelines saying "wow, you've got a really nice project there, maybe you should make it Acceptable to Business so I can use it" is an unrealistic solution, at least in part because the implicit threat of "or noone will ever give you money for it" isn't particularly true anymore.

matthew smillie.

···

On Jun 8, 2006, at 5:33, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

87

That's wierd. I've seen this problem before (I switched to Marshal in
the end), and I still seem to get it now.

$ ruby -v -ryaml -e 'p YAML::Syck::VERSION'
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i686-linux]
"0.60"

$ ruby -r yaml -e' qs = YAML.load(YAML.dump(:"foo bar")); p qs; p qs.class '
:"\"foo bar\""
Symbol

···

On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 02:21 +0900, ara.t.howard@noaa.gov wrote:

On Wed, 7 Jun 2006, Dave Baldwin wrote:

> If I have a quoted symbol, i.e. :'some symbol' then when I dump the YAML for
> it and then load the results I don't get back the symbol I put in, but get an
> extra set of escaped quotes. The following irb session shows this:

i don't see the problem:

   harp:~ > ruby -r yaml -e' qs = YAML.load(YAML.dump(:"foo bar")); p qs; p qs.class; p VERSION '
   :"foo bar"
   Symbol
   "1.8.4"

you are just confusing yourself with irb/inspect

--
Ross Bamford - rosco@roscopeco.REMOVE.co.uk

88

ara, try this:

% irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'yaml'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> sym = :"a symbol"
=> :"a symbol"
irb(main):003:0> sym == sym
=> true
irb(main):004:0> sym == YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
=> false
irb(main):005:0> sym
=> :"a symbol"
irb(main):006:0> YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
=> :"\"a symbol\""
irb(main):007:0> VERSION
=> "1.8.4"

Looks like a bug to me.

···

On Jun 7, 2006, at 1:21 PM, ara.t.howard@noaa.gov wrote:

On Wed, 7 Jun 2006, Dave Baldwin wrote:

If I have a quoted symbol, i.e. :'some symbol' then when I dump the YAML for
it and then load the results I don't get back the symbol I put in, but get an
extra set of escaped quotes. The following irb session shows this:

i don't see the problem:

  harp:~ > ruby -r yaml -e' qs = YAML.load(YAML.dump(:"foo bar")); p qs; p qs.class; p VERSION '
  :"foo bar"
  Symbol
  "1.8.4"

you are just confusing yourself with irb/inspect

irb(main):014:0> YAML.dump(:'some symbol')
=> "--- :\"some symbol\"\n"

     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
     this is the output of String.inspect - not the literal string

try

  harp:~ > irb -r yaml
  irb(main):001:0> dumped = YAML.dump(:'some symbol')
  => "--- :\"some symbol\"\n"
  irb(main):002:0> YAML.load dumped
  => :"some symbol"
  irb(main):003:0> YAML.load(dumped).class
  => Symbol

regards.

-a
--
suffering increases your inner strength. also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama

89

Jeremy Tregunna wrote:

Actually, Lispnik Paul Graham is "redesigning" Lisp to last 100 years
(from now). Do a search for "Paul Graham" and "ARC" to see what he's
proposing. It hasn't moved a lot recently; perhaps he's leaning towards
jumping on the Ruby bandwagon. :slight_smile:

Not to hijack the thread, but make a casual comment regarding Arc.
Paul Graham has done a lot for the Lisp community, however, he's
basically gone in and said "look how great lisp is" while in the same
breath stating, "but wait, ignore it, I'm redesigning it making it
better, but I don't have anything yet, stay tuned". Which essentially
killed a lot of the forward momentum and acceptance of lisp. He's not
exactly someone I'd point to if I were trying to make the point you're
trying to make.

I think he also said something along the lines of "all Ruby needs to be
better than Lisp is Lisp-style macro capabilities." If he didn't,
someone did, and whoever said it, I agree. :slight_smile: Still, designing a
programming language is more about choosing what to leave out than what
to put in.

So ... on the main thread, where are we?

···

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com

90

Matthew Smillie <M.B.Smillie@sms.ed.ac.uk> writes:

name of its creator eludes me. I'd also be willing to bet that there
was an individual at IBM directly responsible for designing Fortran
(though this hunch is based more on the nature of Fortran and the
size and nature of the industry at that point in history than any
concrete knowledge).

John Backus. Perhaps you've heard of Backus-Naur Form as well?

Steve

91

Matthew Smillie wrote:

I actually pointed towards Paul Graham earlier in the thread, though
not about Arc in particular. I've been watching Arc for a while, and
I think I'll reserve judgement until it actually appears. My bet is
that PG's been sidetracked by the spam issue in much the same way that
Knuth got sidetracked by TeX while writing the Art of Computer
Programming.

Email spam doesn't bother me nearly as much as the endless barrage of
junk that is delivered to my regular residential mailbox, over half of
which needs to be shredded to prevent identity theft. Benjamin Franklin
must be rolling over in his grave about now.

Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (and their
colleagues and collaborators) may disagree with your assertion that
they are 'businesses' rather than 'people'.

I suppose, but they designed C, C++ and Java with business projects in
mind, rather than for the pure joy of it or as an academic exercise.

APL emerged out of Harvard's proto-CS department (not really a
business), though the name of its creator eludes me.

Kenneth Iverson. My recollection was that he was an IBM employee at the
time he invented APL ... *I* was an IBM employee at the time and I
distinctly recall him visiting our labs touting it and looking for a
project to bring it to life. Said project later became known as APL\360,
a product that was licensed.

  I'd also be willing to bet that there was an individual at IBM
directly responsible for designing Fortran (though this hunch is based
more on the nature of Fortran and the size and nature of the industry
at that point in history than any concrete knowledge).

John Backus and a team of about five or six others whose names escape me
at the moment. Fortran I had been superseded by Fortran II by the time I
got to IBM (1962). Fortran I was pretty much an IBM 704 macro assembler
with arithmetic statements (FORmula TRANslation) added on. An amazingly
primitive language. Now that I think of it, FORTRAN saw the light of day
in 1956, which means we should be celebrating its 50th birthday this
year!!! Again, a project motivated by a commercial interest.

This was exactly the point I'm trying to make: if a business wants
something which conforms to their needs, they need to directly invest
in the process of its creation. Such as by hiring people like those
listed above to design languages.

In the "good old days", language design was in a certain sense
subservient to the then-onerous task of compiler writing. As I said in
another post, compilers sucked back then, and serious programmers could
out-code them not only in terms of execution speed but also in terms of
time to completion of the software. If you think *compilers* sucked,
compiler-compilers *really* sucked. :slight_smile: Languages had to be easy to
compile or nobody used them.

And the phrases we toss about today in discussing Ruby --
meta-programming, domain-specific languages and automatic programming --
were all part of the vernacular in "the good old days".

Their contribution to projects like Ruby (or even Java, if you include
its community process) has always been the marginal one of providing
incidental employment to people who made direct contributions in their
spare time.

Uh ... OK ... but I don't consider my employment as a performance
engineer "incidental". Maybe the Swiss Patent Office provided
"incidental employment" to Einstein while he was pondering the
photoelectric effect and relativity. I don't think of the role John
Backus played at IBM as "incidental employment".

That marginal contribution has recently been dropping in importance
for a number of reasons, so it really shouldn't surprise these
businesses that projects to which they make essentially no
contribution don't really reflect their needs.

Well ... I think you're understating the contribution of businesses to
the "open source community". They contribute because it's good business
to contribute, not because they feel guilty about using, say, Linux,
which was developed by a community. I don't know how it is with Ruby,
since I'm a newcomer to Ruby, but the other open source communities I
hang out in don't have any trouble getting contributions from business.

···

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com

92

harp:~ > irb -r yaml
   irb(main):001:0> sym = :"a symbol"
   => :"a symbol"
   irb(main):002:0> sym == sym
   => true
   irb(main):003:0> sym == YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
   => true
   irb(main):004:0> sym
   => :"a symbol"
   irb(main):005:0> YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
   => :"a symbol"
   irb(main):006:0> VERSION
   => "1.8.4"

looks like a bad ruby to me. a package installer? mine is compiled on rhe and
seems to work fine?

-a

···

On Thu, 8 Jun 2006, Logan Capaldo wrote:

ara, try this:

% irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'yaml'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> sym = :"a symbol"
=> :"a symbol"
irb(main):003:0> sym == sym
=> true
irb(main):004:0> sym == YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
=> false
irb(main):005:0> sym
=> :"a symbol"
irb(main):006:0> YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
=> :"\"a symbol\""
irb(main):007:0> VERSION
=> "1.8.4"

Looks like a bug to me.

--
suffering increases your inner strength. also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama

93

So ... on the main thread, where are we?

Well, the main thread was about how long will it be until selling Ruby
to corporations becomes easy. Because people like to work.

The interesting thing is that if you have Gmail, the hijacked version
of the thread -- with all its mentions of Lisp -- is showing me ads
for jobs at Google, Art & Logic, and Jane Street Capital.

Talk about Lisp and Ruby enough in Gmail, and all you get is job ads.

Not to be totally intractable, but I think this totally proves my
earlier point, that people who are looking for good programmers are
much better customers than people who want you to code in Language X.

On the other hand, the Google job ads are all for Java jobs, so,
whatever. Who knows.

···

--
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org

94

Their contribution to projects like Ruby (or even Java, if you include
its community process) has always been the marginal one of providing
incidental employment to people who made direct contributions in their
spare time.

Uh ... OK ... but I don't consider my employment as a performance
engineer "incidental". Maybe the Swiss Patent Office provided
"incidental employment" to Einstein while he was pondering the
photoelectric effect and relativity. I don't think of the role John
Backus played at IBM as "incidental employment".

I have a hunch that I haven't been clear enough - it seems like we agree at the basics, so I'll try and restate it. I have nothing against commercial motivation or business in general. What I do recognise is that there are many different classes of business when it comes to their contributions and attitudes to software development. So let me explain what I mean by 'incidental' employment: if I'm working on some project in my own time, my employment (no matter how interesting it is in and of itself) is incidental to that project (and vice-versa). Implicitly, there are any number of jobs that I could have which would contribute equally to my other project.

Now, my employer can be said to be contributing to that project, since they're supporting me while I undertake that (unpaid) project, but it's a pretty marginal contribution. I wouldn't suggest that Backus' contributions were incidental to his role at IBM at all, while I'm not a party to his job description, it seems likely that he was employed specifically to make contributions like that.

I think I should emphasise the fact that I'm not really talking about the IBMs and Suns of the world; companies who are in the business of creating tools like Fortran and Java. They, rather obviously, are busy directly producing software tailored to their (business) needs.

I don't know how it is with Ruby,
since I'm a newcomer to Ruby, but the other open source communities I
hang out in don't have any trouble getting contributions from business.

That's exactly what I've been trying to say, along with the notion that not all businesses are the same. The result of this is that the people involved don't have to pander to the traditional notion of "business acceptance" in order to get contributions and support, because there's another class of business which doesn't apply the usual criteria that "business acceptance" normally implies.

I think that's a brilliant situation, and only hope it expands. It provides a much broader spectrum of employment for programmers, which can't be a bad thing, and is changing the way that business invests in software in a way that allows for much more flexible development priorities, and a process where technical concerns have a bigger place at the table than risk aversion. The risk aversion implied by "business acceptance" (as I went into earlier) leads businesses to adopt less technically-sophisticated methods and prefer a relatively de-skilled type of commodity programmer - something I doubt anyone particularly wants to be.

What I particularly dislike is the notion that unless project X obtains this ethereal state of "business acceptance" that there's no way it can be used to make money - you've pointed out it's not true, I've pointed out it's not true, but people still say things like this: "It may be that [without business acceptance] Ruby's future is all about projects that are undertaken for love, not money."[1] and insisting that being used in mainstream corporate work is the all-singing all-dancing holy grail for a software project.

matthew smillie.

[1]I love Ruby - But how bright is Ruby's Future? - Ruby - Ruby-Forum

···

On Jun 9, 2006, at 5:32, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

95

Compiled from source on OS X. Yay! A platform-specific problem. My favorite.

···

On Jun 7, 2006, at 2:53 PM, ara.t.howard@noaa.gov wrote:

On Thu, 8 Jun 2006, Logan Capaldo wrote:

ara, try this:

% irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'yaml'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> sym = :"a symbol"
=> :"a symbol"
irb(main):003:0> sym == sym
=> true
irb(main):004:0> sym == YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
=> false
irb(main):005:0> sym
=> :"a symbol"
irb(main):006:0> YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
=> :"\"a symbol\""
irb(main):007:0> VERSION
=> "1.8.4"

Looks like a bug to me.

  harp:~ > irb -r yaml
  irb(main):001:0> sym = :"a symbol"
  => :"a symbol"
  irb(main):002:0> sym == sym
  => true
  irb(main):003:0> sym == YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
  => true
  irb(main):004:0> sym
  => :"a symbol"
  irb(main):005:0> YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
  => :"a symbol"
  irb(main):006:0> VERSION
  => "1.8.4"

looks like a bad ruby to me. a package installer? mine is compiled on rhe and
seems to work fine?

-a
--
suffering increases your inner strength. also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama

96

The original post's title: "I love Ruby - But how bright is Ruby's future?"
Also from the original post: "I love Ruby but I don't want to waist [sic] my
time with a laguage [sic] that may not have a future." Fundamentally, this
has nothing to do with how long it will take to sell Ruby to corporations.

I tried to establish that widespread adoption by corporate IT shops (in the
way that has been achieved by Java) would be a good way to ensure that Ruby
has a bright future. But the consensus of the thread (as I read it) is that
widespread adoption by business is not material to Ruby's success, and is at
least suspicious when considered as a goal for the Ruby community.

Ruby can clearly be sold to programmers on its merits as a programming
language. (It can't be sold to IT managers on that basis, but our sense is
that their acceptance doesn't really matter.) Beyond that, I'm not sure if
we've come any closer to answering the original question.

···

On 6/8/06, Giles Bowkett <gilesb@gmail.com> wrote:

> So ... on the main thread, where are we?

Well, the main thread was about how long will it be until selling Ruby
to corporations becomes easy. Because people like to work.

The interesting thing is that if you have Gmail, the hijacked version
of the thread -- with all its mentions of Lisp -- is showing me ads
for jobs at Google, Art & Logic, and Jane Street Capital.

Talk about Lisp and Ruby enough in Gmail, and all you get is job ads.

Not to be totally intractable, but I think this totally proves my
earlier point, that people who are looking for good programmers are
much better customers than people who want you to code in Language X.

On the other hand, the Google job ads are all for Java jobs, so,
whatever. Who knows.

--
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org

97

ah. bummer. this is what's kept me from moving to mac - seen too many of
these thus far. guess i'll have to wait a while more ;-(

cheers.

-a

···

On Thu, 8 Jun 2006, Logan Capaldo wrote:

Compiled from source on OS X. Yay! A platform-specific problem. My favorite.

--
suffering increases your inner strength. also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama

98

Hi --

···

On Thu, 8 Jun 2006, Logan Capaldo wrote:

On Jun 7, 2006, at 2:53 PM, ara.t.howard@noaa.gov wrote:

On Thu, 8 Jun 2006, Logan Capaldo wrote:

ara, try this:

% irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'yaml'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> sym = :"a symbol"
=> :"a symbol"
irb(main):003:0> sym == sym
=> true
irb(main):004:0> sym == YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
=> false
irb(main):005:0> sym
=> :"a symbol"
irb(main):006:0> YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
=> :"\"a symbol\""
irb(main):007:0> VERSION
=> "1.8.4"

Looks like a bug to me.

harp:~ > irb -r yaml
irb(main):001:0> sym = :"a symbol"
=> :"a symbol"
irb(main):002:0> sym == sym
=> true
irb(main):003:0> sym == YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
=> true
irb(main):004:0> sym
=> :"a symbol"
irb(main):005:0> YAML.load(YAML.dump(sym))
=> :"a symbol"
irb(main):006:0> VERSION
=> "1.8.4"

looks like a bad ruby to me. a package installer? mine is compiled on rhe and
seems to work fine?

-a
--
suffering increases your inner strength. also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama

Compiled from source on OS X. Yay! A platform-specific problem. My favorite.

I think it's a platform-specific solution -- that is, it only works on
Ara's computer :slight_smile: I get the same results you get, on my Mac and on
a PC running Fedora. I guess RHE must have patched Ruby in some way.

David

--
David A. Black (dblack@wobblini.net)
* Ruby Power and Light, LLC (http://www.rubypowerandlight.com)
   > Ruby and Rails consultancy and training
* Author of "Ruby for Rails" from Manning Publications!
   > Ruby for Rails

99

The original post's title: "I love Ruby - But how bright is Ruby's future?"
Also from the original post: "I love Ruby but I don't want to waist [sic] my
time with a laguage [sic] that may not have a future." Fundamentally, this
has nothing to do with how long it will take to sell Ruby to corporations.

I tried to establish that widespread adoption by corporate IT shops (in the
way that has been achieved by Java) would be a good way to ensure that Ruby
has a bright future.

???

"Fundamentally, [the brightness of Ruby's future] has nothing do with
how long it will take to sell Ruby to corporations...widespread
adoption by corporate IT shops...would be a good way to ensure that
Ruby has a bright future."

???

???

**jaw hanging open**

**totally not getting it**

But the consensus of the thread (as I read it) is that
widespread adoption by business is not material to Ruby's success, and is at
least suspicious when considered as a goal for the Ruby community.

well, a lot of new people are coming to the Ruby community via Rails.
I can't speak for everybody but that's a big part of what brought me
here. and the thing is, if you look into the roots of Rails, the
company it came from, 37 Signals, they're very strident and hardcore
about the difference between corporations and business. in fact a lot
of the norms of corporate IT departments are viewed pretty scornfully
by those guys (e.g., "Meetings Are Toxic," "There's Nothing Functional
About A Functional Spec," Jason Fried's rants about the way things are
generally done in corporate IT departments).

I think there's definitely a difference between corporations and
business in general. I think widespread adoption by **corporations**
is viewed suspiciously. I could be wrong tho.

I think the general opinion might be that corporate IT departments are
bright for Ruby's future as a source of income but dark for its future
as a beautiful language. But that could be wrong. As I understand it
Ruby is pretty mainstream in Japan.

···

On 6/8/06, Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@gmail.com> wrote:

--
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org

100

nope - rhe uses ruby 1.6.8! this is ruby compiled from source:

   harp:~ > ruby --version
   ruby 1.8.4 (2006-01-12) [i686-linux]

   harp:~ > ruby -r yaml -e' p YAML.load(YAML.dump( :"foo bar" )) '
   :"foo bar"

what's yours?

-a

···

On Thu, 8 Jun 2006 dblack@wobblini.net wrote:

I think it's a platform-specific solution -- that is, it only works on
Ara's computer :slight_smile: I get the same results you get, on my Mac and on
a PC running Fedora. I guess RHE must have patched Ruby in some way.

--
suffering increases your inner strength. also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama