Don't let this happen to Ruby, pleeeeease?

Ruby
21

On 2/20/06, Dave H. [email protected] wrote:

Or you could ignore him. I certainly found comments like “It takes at
significant majority of Ruby users on any platform in my opinion.” You

what
it’s worth, I think your point “Programming languages and tools are not
end-user software.” is quite wrong.

I agree. I have and use Ruby because I want to build programs and tools
for myself…in Ruby. The time I spend having to poop around with
recompiling Ruby, reinstalling Ruby, re-downloading source for Ruby,
debugging Ruby’s installers, is wasted time. I wasted something like
three or four hours trying to get readline support working with irb,
IIRC.

Did you document this struggle (for success or failure)? To complain
about
a lack of documentation is fine. To be presented with an opportunity to
help the situation, but instead just complain, that I find a bit rude.

And if I have to spend time sending

messages to Ruby-Talk trying to find out how to get Ruby to work
instead of programming, then Ruby’s not very good.

Actually, then Ruby’s documentation would not be very good. The whole
not
judging a book by its cover and all. That isn’t to say people’s
perceptions
of Ruby are not influenced by the quality and availability of its
documentation, but that doesn’t make it right either :slight_smile:

Pointing out weaknesses in something to its fan base doesn’t always
make you friends, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. Thanks,
Glenn; hopefully your observations will help Ruby grow even stronger.

Pointing fingers is fine, lending a hand will make you friends. I don’t
mean this is a flame, or a personal attack, as I have been guilty of it
myself but I’m always amazed at the people who complain about the
quality of
documentation specifically in open source software. I’ve seen it on a
good
dozen projects, new users spend pages and pages of writing complaining
about
something missing from the documentation, without ever submitting a hard
suggestion to fix. And especially without providing a bit of
documentation
themselves.

So please, if you find rough spots, places that you spend hours that you
think you should only spend minutes, document the steps you took, the
errors
you received, the problems you hit, and submit them. At the very least
you’ll get a better informed answer, and at the best you’ll have helped
produce new documentation.

22

On 2/20/06, Dave H. [email protected] wrote:

I’m sure if I spent more time not trying to actually get work done, I
could get that fixed, by asking questions here. But I have a copy of
Pickaxe, so I just use that. If I have to spend time working on my car
instead of driving to work, then my car isn’t very good. If I have to
spend time working on my computer instead of using it to get work done,
then my computer’s not very good. And if I have to spend time sending
messages to Ruby-Talk trying to find out how to get Ruby to work
instead of programming, then Ruby’s not very good.

Ruby is not about being very good. It’s about world domination.

(C)M AT Z(S): How are you gentlemen !!
(C)M AT Z(S): All your base are belong to us.
(C)M AT Z(S): You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
(C)M AT Z(S): You have no chance to survive make your time.
(C)M AT Z(S): Ha Ha Ha Ha ....

See… thats matz… er… Cats… laughing at you. Move Zig!

On a serious note though, for an emerging language that only fairly
recently became popular in english speaking countries, I think Ruby is
great in terms of support.

If talking to people on #ruby-lang or RubyTalk or searching archives
and using a little google fu is not something you can afford right
now, no big deal. We’ll still be here if you decide to come back
later on.

As a library developer (working on relatively small things at that),
I’d love to have some awesome documentation. Time constraints slow
that process. I can only imagine what those constraints are like on
the big things. So… just be patient. Or whenever you do end up
having to search a little deeper for something, write down what you
did and build a little tutorial. The community will appreciate it and
it’ll help overall.

23

Thanks for your words of support Dave - I was beginning to think I was
in a
minority, but I’m sure I’m not!

One day I really will try to sit down and spend time developing
something
for the community - be it Ruby or some other project. And in the
meantime
I’m eternally grateful to others for the work they do and the help they
give
to idiots like me!!!

Glenn

On 20/02/06, Dave H. [email protected] wrote:

Or you could ignore him. I certainly found comments like “It takes at
most five minutes over a slow connection of clicking around to figure
that out on the ruby-lang website, hopefully much less after
the revamp, and at most 30 seconds for anyone with mediocre google
skills to get the basic points right.” to be not only annoyingly
condescending, but quite opposite of my experience, which seems to
involve spending a lot of time finding documentation misplaced,
dreadfully obscure, or just plain missing, and discovering new and
different ways for those oh-so-easy installers to fail.

etc…

24

Dave H. wrote:

I’m sure if I spent more time not trying to actually get work done, I
could get that fixed, by asking questions here. But I have a copy of
Pickaxe, so I just use that. If I have to spend time working on my car
instead of driving to work, then my car isn’t very good. If I have to
spend time working on my computer instead of using it to get work done,
then my computer’s not very good. And if I have to spend time sending
messages to Ruby-Talk trying to find out how to get Ruby to work instead
of programming, then Ruby’s not very good.

To be fair, though, most people have little trouble getting Ruby
installed and running. I do not mean to belittle or discount your
experiences, but I’ve not had an issue with any release of Ruby when
packaged up as the “one-click” Windows installer (discounting preview
packages), nor have I had a problem installing final releases of Ruby
from source code on Linux. I used to have routine errors installing
Rails from gems, but that’s no longer an issue.

If you have a problem with getting Ruby up and running, post to this
list. If asking for help here is not an attractive solution, then
indeed you are on your own.

…
I also agree with you, Glenn, in that I don’t think these problems are
fundamental problems with Ruby itself, or its tools, or its community.
The problem is with people who don’t recognize or admit that these ARE
problems, and would try to deny or excuse them. These issues can be, and
are being, resolved, but only as long as they’re recognized as issues
that NEED to be resolved.

It isn’t that people are busy denying that some people still have
problems, it’s that people are just busy, period.

Drivers wanted.

–
James B.

“You harmonize; then you customize.”

  • Wilson Pickett
25

On Feb 20, 2006, at 6:59, James B. wrote:

To be fair, though, most people have little trouble getting Ruby
installed and running.

I know. I cannot believe my setups differ in some fundamental manner
from many other people, so why I suffer installer problems (always
different) remains something of a mystery to me. Sigh. I can’t be
that stupid . . .

It isn’t that people are busy denying that some people still have
problems, it’s that people are just busy, period.

Er, my original post was prompted by a post that I found hard to
interpret as anything other than denying or attempting to excuse some
of the ‘opportunities’ still available to newbies coming to Ruby.

Happily, such attitudes are unquestionably a small minority.

[see next post…]

26

On Feb 20, 2006, at 7:32, Tanner B. wrote:

about
a lack of documentation is fine. To be presented with an opportunity
to
help the situation, but instead just complain, that I find a bit rude.

Well, the last time I had a problem with the Ruby core itself, I just
hammered at it for a while until it worked. I think I just wiped my
downloaded source-install folder and started over, since some part of
the Make got bent during the first attempt.

My most recent major frustration was actually with RubyCocoa, and I did
post quite a few messages to the rubycocoa mailing list. Some of them,
er, reflected my frustration at the time more than might be considered
polite, but nobody there threw anything my way except helpful
suggestions. :slight_smile: I discovered and pointed out that the Rubycocoa
installer choked on an install path with a space in it, which was
quickly fixed.

If you want to see some of my very early problems with installing Ruby,
you might check out

Pointing fingers is fine, lending a hand will make you friends. I
don’t
mean this is a flame, or a personal attack,

Nor did I take it as such. :slight_smile:

So please, if you find rough spots, places that you spend hours that
you
think you should only spend minutes, document the steps you took, the
errors
you received, the problems you hit, and submit them. At the very least
you’ll get a better informed answer, and at the best you’ll have helped
produce new documentation.

I also offer in my defense my post to the recent thread here
entitled “postgres database”…

"A suggestion to the wider PostgreSQL-using Ruby populace; I was
somewhat confused until I figured out that I had to install at least
part of Postgres (bits of library files, I think) on the machine
running Ruby in order to talk to the database that’s running on a
different system.

“If somebody should happen to write/update/expand upon the instructions
for installing Postgres support into Ruby to include the case where the
Ruby code is being installed and/or running on a system without local
Postgres, that’d probably be a good thing . . . :slight_smile: Maybe some way to
permanently bind the libraries into the gem-installed Ruby bits?”

Plus my contributions (of some unknown value :slight_smile: to the recent pile of
postings about “What is a symbol?”