The reason I came to ruby was that it had regular expressions like perl so it was possible to do small quick hack and at the same time it was as purely object-oriented as smalltalk. The main reason I didn't like Python wasn't very object-oriented (everything was not an object, nothing was private), it forced indentation, I hate the idea of having tuples and vectors. I think hyping Ruby as a pure language is important. Also emphasizing that Ruby can do quick scripts and is a practical language will show people that Ruby is the best of both worlds. I really liked it when I found out about the fact that you could do things like 1.+(5) in Ruby or "jfskdjkl".class. I also like the fact that Ruby could do regular expressions and yet regular expressions were objects themselves. Now the main reason I can't use ruby or justify recommending ruby to others is that Ruby's libraries are just not as comprehensive as python's. Ruby needs to have better libraries and more applications to become more popular. But to have bigger libraries it needs to be more popular so that it can attract the programmers to write them. The only was to get out of this catch-22 is just to wait a long time and hope for a critical mass or write something that is used by a lot of people and is written in Ruby. I think Rails is an app that has the potential to make people look at Ruby. It is a visible project that a lot of people are finding out about it. Another thing I am wondering about is the Japanese ruby users. It feels like the communities are not really connected together and not really pulling in the same direction. Maybe we need more Japanese to English translators and vice versa. I don't know if we are aware of everything the Japanese users are doing. Maybe this is just due to the language barrier. Are there any Japanese readers that may have some comments on this? Regards, Trevor Andrade -----Original Message----- From: James Britt [mailto:jamesUNDERBARb / neurogami.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 11:58 PM To: ruby-talk ML Subject: Re: Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity Tim Sutherland wrote: ... > The links at the top and the sidebar(s) on the right are the only parts of the > page that have to do with Ruby documentation, most of the page is taken up > with announcements and so on. > > Maybe move all the announcements to a small sidebar with short summaries? They're basically going away. When the site started there was more news than docs. Aside from Dave's outstanding Programming Ruby there was little else to link to. It was more a blog for the RDP than a documentation directory. When a new resource came around, it was big news. That's changed in a big way. Nowadays, there's almost little point in announcing when a new resource is available, as they pop up too frequently. (It's still big news, but, thankfully, not *as* big, owing to the increased frequency.) Instead, what's needed (and coming along) is a better way to organize and search known resources,and a way to recognize these resources without a central administrator having to add them. So certain things will remain (primarily the links to the more stable and essential docs, such as the core classes, standard lib, and C API, as well as doc bundles and other downloads), but the main page will focus more on immediately directing users to resources for assorted development tasks. Along with this, the overall style will get cleaned up, so it will easier for the eye to pick out and follow things.