Sarah Tanembaum <sarahtanembaum / yahoo.com> wrote:
> Martin DeMello wrote:
> > The thing is, quite apart from the language, there are a bunch of fiddly
> > details you have to keep in mind when writing a shopping cart. My guess
> > is that no one in the ruby community felt it'd be sufficiently
> > fun/interesting to go through this particular exercise; the php
> > community being so much bigger meant it was likelier to include someone
> > with an interest in shopping carts.
> > 
> In other word, it is a bit tedious to do it in Ruby, whereas in PHP 
> language(and its library) has more complete tools/utilities to do far 
> fun/interesting projects/excercise - which include shopping cart, 
> cataloging, content management, interactive database apps, etc...

Are you deliberately misinterpreting me? I said it was tedious to write
a shopping cart, quite independent of the language. If I did have to
write one (e.g. if my boss said "We need a shopping cart and it has to
be developed in-house") I'd definitely do it in ruby. In other words,
I'm saying that, given my particular interests and inclinations, a
shopping cart is neither fun nor interesting. However, given a large
enough set of people, there's likely to be *someone* for whom it is
interesting. The ruby community just doesn't have that critical mass
yet. 

> That is what I've been saying all along, but there are some reluctancy 
> amongs Rubyist to admit this issues. Perhaps if we realize this problem, 
> we can fix it and make Ruby the language of choice to do fun and quite 
> interesting projects.

If you are interested in carts, sit down and define the requirements
exactly. I guarantee you you'll find a nice ruby library already exists
for every requirement. It's the design stage that is the problem.

martin