4 ms·

While your concerns have merit, the overall picture is not nearly so bleak. Yes, the stdlib docs need some love. I've tried assorted approaches to rousing int

While your concerns have merit, the overall picture is not nearly so bleak. Yes, the stdlib docs need some love. I've tried assorted approaches to rousing interest, and now consider it a dead end. A handful of people have done a terrific job in improving what was a once worse situation, and everyone who uses Ruby should be grateful to them, but there's much more to be done. Still, you can get often excellent help on ruby-talk or #ruby-lang on freenode. I feel your pain about available info being Rails-centric; I don't know what the answer there is. Careful Googling perhaps. " -Rails" is your friend. I like having multiple libraries for things. I ask around, get some advice, maybe try some out, and life is good. Really, it's not a big deal. And Drb is really sweet, and fun to play with. "I think Ruby is a really neat language but the Ruby community needs to stop confusing people who want to try it out." Actually, it's various individuals expressing their own opinions. Take it all with a grain of salt. BTW, if you decide to dig fully into Ruby and have questions, feel free to drop me an E-mail. My addy is in my HN profile.

dagw 16y ago
I like having multiple libraries for things...Really, it's not a big deal. Right up until the point you try to deploy your program over a large number of platforms. Sure if all you're doing is hosting a webapp on a server you control (which seems to be the main use case for Ruby), then it's not a problem. Once you start trying to deploy on platforms you don't control a complete standard lib becomes really handy. That is one reason I really like python. I can say something like "install any version of python 2 after 2.6.2" and that's all they need to worry about. There is very little you cannot do using only the standard lib. No hunting for and installing third party libs with all the troubles that can cause. Obviously I'm not arguing against third party libraries. I use and love many in python. But the fact that they are optional in most cases is really handy.
- FooBarWidget 16y ago
  Why can't you just bundle the libraries with your app? I'm not sure I agree with your argument. All but the simplest Python/Java/C++/.NET apps also require third party libraries.

dagw 16y ago

I like having multiple libraries for things...Really, it's not a big deal. Right up until the point you try to deploy your program over a large number of platforms. Sure if all you're doing is hosting a webapp on a server you control (which seems to be the main use case for Ruby), then it's not a problem. Once you start trying to deploy on platforms you don't control a complete standard lib becomes really handy. That is one reason I really like python. I can say something like "install any version of python 2 after 2.6.2" and that's all they need to worry about. There is very little you cannot do using only the standard lib. No hunting for and installing third party libs with all the troubles that can cause. Obviously I'm not arguing against third party libraries. I use and love many in python. But the fact that they are optional in most cases is really handy.

FooBarWidget 16y ago
Why can't you just bundle the libraries with your app? I'm not sure I agree with your argument. All but the simplest Python/Java/C++/.NET apps also require third party libraries.