Ground control to major tim, can you hear me? I don't think so. I do
believe your personal communicator has gone haywire and you are
receiving my messages backwards and sideways. Please report to your
nearest space post and exchange your personal communicator for a working
model. Over and out.

On Fri, 30 Aug 2002 03:00:07 -0400, Tim Hammerquist wrote:

> stibbs graced us by uttering:
>> > That is to say, what is it that is changing between the
>> > currently-available Perl 5.x and Perl 6 that will suddenly nullify
>> > the things that have drawn large numbers of "converts" from the Perl
>> > and Python camps?
>> 
>> Every person that i know of who "converted" to ruby has since long
>> converted back to using python as their main language due to the
>> documentation issue, and i have quite a few online friends i have kept
>> in contact with for quite some years that did this.
> 
> _THAT_ won't happen.
> 
> I'm sorry, but if Ruby ever went downhill (God forbid!), I'm goin' back
> to Perl.  If there was ever a language that made it difficult to do some
> of the simplest things imaginable, well, it's Java.  But after that,
> it's Python.  ;)
> 
>> And i find most people that i know do like perl but they use python for
>> the more clean/realistic OO.
> 
> I've started to use Ruby for general system scripting in addition to
> larger projects.
> 
>> I think that rather than read through my original post and look at what
>> you can pick apart about it, it might be a good idea to just try and
>> see where i might be coming from. Judging from your reply to my
>> original post, it seems you assume i'm just some newbie who has been
>> looking at ruby for a few days and didnt put much effort in finding
>> what online documentation is actually available for ruby (even though i
>> stated the opposite in my original post).
> 
> As far as taking you for a newbie, you asked the same exact question
> most newbies who _don't_ know how to use Google or ri would ask.  It was
> most likely a mistake, and it certainly wasn't personal.
> 
> I think that rather than simply criticizing the community's efforts so
> harshly, it might be a good idea to offer to aid in the documentation,
> especially since Ruby and her documention is an open source endeavour
> relying on volunteers rather than complaints.  Feedback is always
> important, but people can only do so much for free.
> 
> Would you be willing to help a more detailed documentation project?
> Obviously we can't develop a doc project equivalent to Perl's perldoc
> overnight, but it can happen with enough hard work.  Do you have enough
> free time from your job to help in this regard?
> 
> Tim Hammerquist