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I don't think any programming language is guaranteed to run
forever. A programming language is mortal. Consider assembly language.
It was widely used at first, but it was soon surpassed by C. Later,
people started to learn C++ because it is a successor of C and it has
object oriented programming feature. Later, Java stroked the earth.

Recently, Bruce A. Tate wrote a book titled 'Beyond Java.' In that book,
he said that Java may face a death sooner or later, and java programmer
have to consider other alternatives. Interestingly, he took Ruby as an
example. That means that RoR and Ruby certainly seems to be promising.

I agree with you that Python is not fun, but it has lots of users and
documents and websites about it. In fact, 'a good language' does not
imply 'a succeeded language.' Many other factors like community affects
the fate of a language, and python has some strong points that Ruby
doesn't have.

To be frank, I would recommend you to learn C++ or Java if you want to
become an application programmer. If you want to be a system programmer,
C is the best choice. If you care a lot about web programming, I recommend
Ruby/Java/.NET. If you want to learn some language which glues well with
existing language like C, C++ and want to write some simple apps, I
would recommend Python.

I myself am learning Python after I finished basic grammars and techniques
of Ruby, and I've found interesting posts at comp.lang.python in which
people
talk about Python's future with regard to Java. They also consider Java as
fairly prominent while Python's future as murky.

But who knows the future? haha.

Sincerely,
Minkoo Seo


On 6/5/06, Hector <dummy / tracatran.com> wrote:
>
> I've been trying to pickup Ruby for a few months now. I've written a few
> good programs that help me at work with SAN/Unix Administration. I've
> also run into a few dificult(for me) programming problems. I like to
> figure things out on my own so I never post questions in forums like
> this, this probably contributes to my bad programming skill, but that's
> besides the point.
>
> I'm at a point where I'm asking myself if it is worth the trouble for me
> to learn Ruby. How many people are really writting Ruby? Are there any
> truly robust, good applications being written in Ruby? How well are Ruby
> libraries being maintained? I know there is a lot of documentation for
> Ruby but I find it hard to find very specific docs. Python seems to have
> a whole lot more doc and many more books exist for Python. Does Python
> have a greater following. I love Ruby but I don't want to waist my time
> with a laguage that may not have a future.
>
> I don't really care about learning 10 programming languages. My brain
> wouldn't be able handle it. I want to learn 1 or two languages and learn
> them well.  I know Pascal very well, I know Perl pretty well, now I
> would like to get away from Perl and so I started out leaning Python. I
> think Python is ugly and not very fun to write. I then jumped into
> Ruby(a whole lot of fun!) but I don't get the warm and fussies about
> Ruby's lasting power.
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
>

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