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Ruby and the Opposite of Momentum

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Re: Ruby and the Opposite of Momentum

#3

Post by petercooper »

Not to rub salt into this whole pile of hurt in the Ruby world lately, but I'm shortly going to be promoting (on Ruby Inside) some rather damning news from the Windows camp in relation to how many significant Ruby libraries are either ignoring Windows or not being transparent enough to make it easy to patch the issues.

(I'm not a Windows user, but if Windows is treated like a third world country by Ruby users, it's going to bite us all in the ass.)

Re: Ruby and the Opposite of Momentum

#4

Post by blasdel »

The Ruby Language itself has plenty of warts, but the implementation problems are far worse. The MRI is awful, and 1.9 isn't much of an improvement at all.

The best hope I see for Ruby's future is embodied in re-implementations like MacRuby, JRuby, and Rubinius. MacRuby could totally become the popular way to write new Cocoa applications.

If MRI can be effectively displaced, Ruby can really break out of the "Perl that people write better code in" ghetto.

Re: Ruby and the Opposite of Momentum

#5

Post by jmtulloss »

henning wrote: post #2

So, does this mean you're going to use other languages more often? If so, which?

For me, python, but that's not exactly a change ;).

I've always felt that python offered the same benefits as ruby accept with a simpler syntax, better cross platform support, better performance, and a more organized community.

Re: Ruby and the Opposite of Momentum

#6

Post by jrsims »

blasdel wrote: post #4

The Ruby Language itself has plenty of warts, but the implementation problems are far worse. The MRI is awful, and 1.9 isn't much of an improvement at all. The best hope I see for Ruby's future is embodied in re-implementations like MacRuby, JRuby, and Rubinius. MacRuby could totally become the popular way to write new Cocoa applications. If MRI can be effectively displaced, Ruby can really break out of the "Perl tha…

cough Parrot! cough

But seriously, anyone know if Parrot is a realistic vehicle for this?

It's just puzzling to me that with all the demand for a better interpreter, there really aren't any available options that are going to satisfy the community at large, and there's no visible light at the end of the tunnel. Is this because Ruby is a particularly difficult language to implement? Is it because there is no formal spec? Lack of leadership (compare with Guido and Larry)? All of the above?

Re: Ruby and the Opposite of Momentum

#7

Post by tocomment »

jmtulloss wrote: post #5
henning wrote: post #2

So, does this mean you're going to use other languages more often? If so, which?

For me, python, but that's not exactly a change ;). I've always felt that python offered the same benefits as ruby accept with a simpler syntax, better cross platform support, better performance, and a more organized community.

I find the "there's only one way to do it" philosophy of Python to be really important. That's the main thing that kept Ruby off my radar.

Re: Ruby and the Opposite of Momentum

#9

Post by palish »

petercooper wrote: post #3

Not to rub salt into this whole pile of hurt in the Ruby world lately, but I'm shortly going to be promoting (on Ruby Inside) some rather damning news from the Windows camp in relation to how many significant Ruby libraries are either ignoring Windows or not being transparent enough to make it easy to patch the issues. (I'm not a Windows user, but if Windows is treated like a third world country by Ruby users, it's g…

That is the primary reason I chose not to use SBCL (Lisp) to implement the game engine I'm building. I really wanted to, but SBCL leaks memory on Windows. When I asked their mailing list about how to fix it, the community was silent. Those two issues make it impractical to use SBCL to develop a product.
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