>I noticed the other day (I think it was 2 days ago?) that Dave Thomas 
>mentioned on the XP list something about ruby not being suited for gui 
>applications at this time.
>
>** Disclaimer: I may not have the exact wording so please don't put me in 
>front of the firing squad on this one :) I'm asking this question out of pure 
>curiousity.
>
>I was wondering what are the reasons for that and who else would 
>agree/disagree and why?

I partially agree. I'm currently developing a GUI app in ruby, and it's 
going...ok. I had to decide between Tk, GTK, and FLTK. One of my goals 
is cross-platform operation on *nix, Windows, and Mac (ugh). Only Tk 
does that as far as I can tell.

Tk is not particularly pleasant for me to work in. (My background is 
mostly MFC, but I've used a few other GUI toolkits). One of the biggest 
drawbacks is the lack of documentation. I've read and re-read the Tk 
chapter of the Programming Ruby book tens of times. 

I also bought "Learning Perl/Tk", and have spent a lot of time 
browsing Perl/Tk references on the web. Unfortunately, I still have 
to translate everything back into ruby, which is not always easy.

The bottom line is that I *do* have a GUI app working, and I will 
continue to get better with Tk. Or I will switch to GTK. Or someone 
(me?) will create wxRuby. If I didn't have my heart set on learning 
ruby, I'd probably use C++ or Java for my GUI app.

Kevin