Below, I posting the entire text of this blog entry:

  http://sean.typepad.com/ditto/2005/03/the_problem_wit.html

I think that this guy has really called it right. There have been a few
postings about a reworking of RAA... does anyone know the current status of
this effort?

Curt

==========================
http://sean.typepad.com/ditto/2005/03/the_problem_wit.html
The Problem with Ruby

I've been singing the praises of Ruby lately but I gotta come clean. There
are some real problems as well.

First, let me summarize my favorite points of Ruby:

   1. Intuitive syntax for any OO programmer.
   2. Rails is simply stated the perfect balance between a highly productive
and an easily manageable web application development environment.
   3. The entire Ruby community is amazingly friendly and helpful.

Now for the bad:

   1. Libraries are in an awful state. It appears nearly half of them are
abandoned. There's no consistency in reporting dependencies or interoperable
versions - and many don't bother at all.
   2. Documentation is similarly weak. There doesn't seem to be any
conventions at all.

It may seem that these two points are minor, but I assure the Ruby community
that these two points are more than enough to frustrate 90% of the
programmers who are otherwise attracted to Ruby's syntax and Rails.
Especially when you consider Perl's massive library - I still find myself
using Perl when I'd like to use Ruby simply because I can easily find a Perl
module.

These two problems are serious enough that I'd suggest that Matz and
community establish specific standards for denoting how libraries are
packaged, documented, and version dependencies (with third party product, C
libraries, other Ruby libraries, etc.) are designated. I'd also suggest that
RAA come up with a mechanism for denoting abandoned libraries vs. ones that
simply don't need to be ugpraded. Maybe an auto-email once a quarter to the
developer?

Core libraries need to be merged, maintained, and updated regularly. It
seems that many Ruby users are on Mac OS X, yet rubycocoa is compiled for
1.6.1 of Ruby and OS X 10.2? The mysql libraries, last I checked, were also
a convoluted mess of different libraries. Let's just pick one and keep it up
to date.

Anyway, enough said. I think I've made my point. Great language, great web
framework (Python still doesn't have anything comparable), but horrendous
libraries.