Daniel,
Thanks for your comments. I’ll do a little snipping to keep this short but
still respond to your questions.
Re: domain, no I do not think it would be a good idea to purchase and then
decide. I mean to simply to take a lead role, collect suggestions from
others, evaluate that they are available, and produce a list of 5 - 10.
The target audience is probably “anyone who develops in Ruby”.
On a second level I’d put people looking for programs made with Ruby.
This is helpful, and although may seem obvious is probably worth stating now
and again to keep us all in check. I’m curious why people looking for
programs made with Ruby is on 2nd level? Would this site be the main site
they would look for Ruby applications?
I agree with “newgie developers”. But how can a computer language be used
by non developers? As for “marketing”, how would you use RAA for
marketing Ruby? I’d like to know.
What i mean by this is that sometimes people who develop in Ruby are not the
decision makers on the development architecture. Many times, in fact, the
person in charge of that decision is not even a technical decision maker.
So, a developer may need to help “sell” on the advantages of Ruby (in
non-technical terms). Sun does a decent job of this with Java and Microsoft
does a good job with VB. Ruby, being new and unproven in many ways, needs
to do an even better job to maximize it’s potential. For instance, I would
suggest (and even volunteer to write) some 1-2 page case studies. I have
seen a site with some positive remarks from users (about a paragraph each),
but I think we need more detail.
In addition, the site can significantly help developers promote their Ruby
applications by singing the praises of the language and the cost benefit to
using Ruby. I have a friend who works for Yahoo Singapore who does a lot of
PERL and C++ development. I was telling her about Ruby and I made a
statement that in many cases the extra costs of CPU and memory (implying
that Ruby would use more than PERL or C++ or C) can be easily negated by
adding up the savings in development time. Now, I also made the
qualification that busy sites like Yahoo! might need every bit of speed from
C and PERL. But she still had a lot of questions for me to answer. I
defended my statement on the fly, but having a URL displaying the results of
a well thought out business case with supporting information can be very
powerful.
Suffice it to say, because of my marketing perspective I think of Ruby not
only as a development language, but as a product platform. For instance,
wouldn’t it be nice of some of the larger technical training centers began
offering classes in Ruby? Who will help convince colleges and universities
to offer these classes (do they already?)? Even if we wait for “demand” on
these issues, we can help those interested by supplying supporting
(marketing) material. A marketing strategy can also be developed in
parallel with the core language strategy and the distribution strategy
(which is what I think the RAA is about right now).
Wouldn’t it be confusing to have two different RAA’s?
Do you think it’s possible to provide all features in the same place?
Absolutely. I did not mean to convey that message at all. I just mean the
same information can be represented on a single web site in multiple ways.
I’m not sure that the Ruby community is large enough to have
an discussion
list dedicated to RAA. For questions/answers, there is ruby-talk.
Fair enough. What I do think would be helpful is to have a list that is
dedicated to question/answers for Ruby development. Also, if ruby-talk is
something different than this list I am posting on now, then there is
something I don’t know about, which is highly likely. For example, there are
probably many users who have questions about certain modules, etc… who wish
they didn’t have to recieve or read this message. 
Thanks for your reply, Daniel. I want to do my best to help.
-Dwayne
P.S. To you knowledge, is anyone taking a lead role in finding a domain?