On 21 Aug 2001 07:19:47 +0900, Joshua Drake wrote: > I really want to present ruby in a good light with the next article. > Any help would be greatly appreciated. Hello Joshua... thank you for writing about Ruby and thank you for asking for help. :) Other people have answered your questions for the second article. For the third and fourth articles, could I recommend looking through the Ruby Wiki? I would particularly recommend Nat Pryce's work on documenting Design Patterns in Ruby. This can be accessed via: http://www.rubygarden.com/ruby?ExampleDesignPatternsInRuby Also of interest would be Colin Steele's work on the Ruby Cookbook at: http://www.rubycookbook.org/ This way, you could pick some examples of good Ruby code and explain how it works, rather than trying to think of an example where Ruby excels (which is hard, without knowing Ruby first). The following links may be of interest: http://pleac.sourceforge.net/ http://www.rubygarden.com/ruby?SlashDotPostingByRussell http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/~poffice/mail/ruby-talk/7056 http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/~poffice/mail/ruby-talk/7044 http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/~poffice/mail/ruby-talk/4541 There's a lot of material worth reading in the ruby-talk archives as there's not much junk posted in here. You'll get lots of interesting things quickly with a couple of searches. Overall, I don't think setting out to show that Ruby is "better" will be possible as there isn't really anything you can point at and say "wow, this is better" - since it will always be possible to do the same thing in another language. What makes Ruby good is the accumulative total of everything being easy. It can do so much, and yet it didn't turn into C++. In this respect, Python is a close competitor so you may have to find specific issues to try and show the difference (but this probably isn't worth the effort as it would take pages of analysis to pre-empt all the "but you can do it like this" retorts). Ruby has made the right selection (for some) of easy to do things that combine together to make easy to do systems. The pieces go together like Lego and the castle is built without having to get out the hacksaw and angle grinder. Like Lego, there's only a few ways to join things together so sometimes you don't get exactly what you want (eg, data structures are Array or Hash or Object, you don't get millions of specialised data structures). The benefit of Ruby is when you stop and think "hey, I didn' t have to spend hours debugging - why's that?" and you sit there and scratch your head in puzzlement not knowing why but smirking with satisfaction anyway. :) Hope this helps.