In article <6e869a6b.0207122344.c6b42a7 / posting.google.com>,
Avi Bryant <avi / beta4.com> wrote:
>"Berger, Daniel" <djberge / qwest.com> wrote in message
>news:<7DC1217518FCD311A08A0050DA78574003C6B536 / iamspems04.interprise.com>...
>
>> Right now?  None that I'm aware of.  This is why I'd like to see ActiveState
>> Ruby - it promotes the language by getting PHB's to use it.
>> 
>> /me thinks of writing up a proposal to ActiveState.  What's Vancouver like,
>> anyway. :)
>
>Vancouver's great - could stand to be a tad more cosmopolitan if
>you're used to, say, New York or Chicago, but it's hard to beat the
>combination of city, sea, and mountains.  And the ActiveState offices
>are lovely.

Yeah, Vancouver is great and plenty cosomopolitan for my taste...
It's kind of spendy though...

>
>Last time I talked to them, they seemed skeptical about the commercial
>viability of supporting Ruby, but things have picked up speed since
>then and perhaps they're reevaluating by now...

I suspect that they're not currently hiring, though (same reason most 
other places aren't hiring right now [at least not hiring permanent 
employees, that is]).  Their website lists a couple of openings, both 
are in sales and marketing, not development openings.  When I contacted 
them over a year ago about openings for Ruby developers the person I heard 
back from said that they were interested in working on Ruby but that they 
had to wait for a more favorable business climate before they could 
take on a new language.  Well, the business climate is, if anything, worse 
than it was a year ago.

No, I don't think we can depend on ActiveState to give us a 'commercially 
supported' Ruby (that works well on Windoze too).  I'll echo the 
sentiments of others here: I'm not sure that we really need a 
'commercially supported' Ruby, and ISO900X is pretty much useless or 
worse.  Community support, in my experience, is actually much better than 
coporate support (but, of course it's hard to convice the PHBs of this).

That said, I wonder if we as a community can do for Ruby what ActiveState 
has done for Perl and Python - that is, provide a nicely packaged version 
for Windows.  I think Andrew Hunt has done a wonderful job with the Ruby 
Windows package he has put together, but as several threads have recently 
pointed out, there is still a lot more to be done.

At any rate, I think the main point I want to get across here is that we 
shouldn't be waiting for ActiveState to come along and do all of this for 
us - I don't think it's gonna happen.  I believe that ActiveState receives 
a good bit of their support from Microsoft - without that support I wonder 
if they could even survive with their current business model.  I really 
don't understand why anyone would use ActiveState (Perl|Python|Tcl|Ruby?) 
on, say, Linux, but it does offer a lot of "added value" under Windows.

So, What would it take to bring our current Ruby for Windows package up to 
the level of what ActiveState is providing for Perl or Python on Windows?


Phil