Gregory Seidman
3/15/2006 2:33:00 PM
On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 11:38:45AM +0900, Trans wrote:
} A while back I wondered if Rails threatened to subordinate Ruby. (See
} ruby-talk:138502). It is interesting to note that for the month of
} March '06 ruby-talk has 2329 messages so far, while the Rails list
} (rails@lists.rubyonrails.org) has 3945. I don't think that's
} significant enough to confirm, but it does lend some weight to the
} somewhat troubling idea.
I have been programming for over two decades, but I only recently learned
Ruby. I used Rails as a means to learn the language, and my first real
attempt at a Ruby project was, indeed, a Rails app.
That said, I learned Ruby largely because I had been waiting for something
to come along that was an improvement over Bourne shell/awk/sed without
offending my sensibilities (the executable line noise of Perl? significant
whitespace in Python? yuck). I recently wrote a 60 line Ruby script to do
some fun things with iPhoto albums, thanks to the iphoto2 and plist gems. I
don't know if I'm likely to use Ruby for GUI apps (I'm fond of C++, C#, and
Obj-C for that), but I'll keep using it for scripting and web apps. I
genuinely like the language.
I'm on both the ruby-talk and rails lists, and they are on similar levels.
I see the following sorts of posts on the two lists:
ruby-talk | rails
----------------------+-----------------------
stupid newbies who | stupid newbies who
can't read docs | can't read docs
|
newbies who really | newbies who really
want to learn, but | want to learn, but
need clarification | need clarification
|
followups to the | followups to the
above with either | above with either
explanations or | explanations or
pointers to docs | pointers to docs
|
announcements of | announcements of
books, websites, or | books, websites, or
code (gems, etc.) | code (gems, etc.)
|
bitching about | bitching about text
unicode support | encoding in JavaScript
|
Ruby Quiz | "I made this website
| with Rails, check it
| out!"
Except for that last one, I'd call it a tie.
} T.
--Greg