matz / zetabits.com (Yukihiro Matsumoto) writes:

> Larry is still a nice guy.  But Perl community might have grown too
> big.  I hope Ruby's community keep being nice and respectful as of
> today, though it's OK to become bigger.

I do not at all doubt that Larry is still a nice guy.  My impression
of him, from reading his book and the transcripts of his various
talks, is that he's a warm and humane man.

It is indeed Perl's wild-fire success, particularly in the domain of
CGI programming, that has led to the current generation of exhausted
and disgruntled gurus in that community.  People with no programming
background, with no programming mindset, with no intrinsic interest in
programming languages, all hear of "Perl/CGI" and come running for a
handout.

As for Ruby... it's my guess that the long-term success of Ruby will
to some extent depend on its documentation.  Good public relations
brings many new people to the party (here I am, thank you Dr. Dobbs),
but you want them to stay.  Of course, further development of
Microsoft-friendly packages (for both the core distribution and
modules) is one way to invite rapid growth, but it may be to your
advantage during this very active stage of language development to
make Ruby "desirable" but "hard-to-get".

I wish Ruby as much success as it can handle!  Maybe I can make some
middlebrow contributions of my own.

-- 
Jonathan Feinberg   jdf / pobox.com   Sunny Brooklyn, NY
http://pobox.com/~jdf