Is Ruby ready to embrace new Linux face and UI realities?

I may be utterly out of line expecting sympathy for my concerns about
Ruby’s readiness to move on to the new and upcoming GNOME-3
environments, but I need to point out that after I embarked on
completing the Ruby/GTK2 Tutorial, I grew increasingly unhappy with the
the GUI solutions currently available in Ruby on Linux platforms. Do not
understand me wrong, there is an abundance of available GUIs one can use
in Ruby, the most prominent are FXRuby, or Tk that should supposedly run
on “any” platform, however, it would be absolutely vital for Linux to
make Ruby feel at home in its native Gtk-x and GNOME-x environments, the
issue which is at the moment far too much neglected! Also perhaps only
due to its rather incomplete documentation, the Cairo graphic interface
is rather poorly represented, and does not seem to be a working as an
integral part of Ruby GUI experience on Linux platforms.

The messy installation procedures and fixes required on Ubuntu in order
to synchronise Ruby 1.9.1 and the GNOME-2 haunt us persistently to this
day. The promises, such as GTK-OSX of GTK+2 on MacOSX, or a even
RubyCocoa which became outdated in the shadows of a superior MacRuby
almost before it saw the light of the day, nevertheless, convinced me
more than a year ago, that I should have perhaps started thinking to
prepare for departure from my favourable Linux platforms towards more
“reliable” commercial ones. Apple’s famed reputation for their superior
OO technologies inherited from another of his babies the NeXT, on which
Steve Jobs modelled and rebuilt all modern Mac OS X platforms, made it
easy for me to decide what should be my path away from Ruby on Linux.

This move, however, turned out to be not only a miserable mistake, but
also futile and a complete waste of almost a year of my time. As I was
encouraged at the beginning, by authors of many Cocoa books and almost
universally, by their blissfully misleading and contradictory
statements, convincing a reader that transitioning to objective-C and
Cocoa should be a snap, on one hand, but on the other, amazed by
brainless clichés telling me “that programming is hard”, and that Cocoa
could never be mastered due to its verbosity similar to human languages
and its enormity that “comes to a total of several tens of thousands of
pages of material” [name one language that has a dictionary of this
size;^(].

So a year ago, when I ventured into Mac’s developer world, I ignorantly
dismissed and brushed these “metaphorical claims” aside, until after the
course of studying this over thirty years old and almost “idiotically”
verbose OO monstrosity, I started to realize, how backward “old state of
the art Cocoa” became today, and that Apple would do itself an
incalculably large favour had it moved to MacRuby, which in turn would
most likely destroy it, because nobody wold give a damn about their
geriatric objective-C and outdated, fossilized and unnecessarily verbose
Cocoa UI or API. That is perhaps why MacRuby for years can not move away
from its 0.x release numbers.

Again this is not to say, that Cocoa as an OT, and particularly from the
OO/D perspective is in any way a bad product - far from it, it is still
superior to anything I have seen so far, however, its implementation is
totally out of date.

Related to the above, I have two questions:

(1)
Does anybody know what is the status of Ruby 1.9.1, Ruby/Gtk and GNOME-2
in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and what are the plans for integration with
future releases of GNOME 3.x. I guess, we still have a year before that
happens, but that does not make me any less concerned, since there
continued to be rather unpleasant surprises for some of us, who wanted
to work with Ruby/Gtk on Ubuntu?

(2)
Will the shift to GNOME 3.0 shell in future Linux releases effect
Ruby/Gtk and Ruby/Cairo?

On May 7, 5:14 pm, Igor P. [email protected] wrote:

(2)
Will the shift to GNOME 3.0 shell in future Linux releases effect
Ruby/Gtk and Ruby/Cairo?

I do not know about GNOME 3, but I have always been under the
impression that the ruby-gnome 2 bindings were pretty good. My use of
them, albeit admittedly light and a while ago, was excellent.

Honestly, if I could get some funding to do it I would work on GUtopIa
(http://github.com/rubyworks/gutopia), between that and Shoes maybe
some nails could finally put in the Ruby GUI complaints that
continually reoccur. But it’s a big project and I simply can’t devote
that kind of time and energy for freebees anymore.

(1)
Does anybody know what is the status of Ruby 1.9.1, Ruby/Gtk and GNOME-2
in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and what are the plans for integration with
future releases of GNOME 3.x. I guess, we still have a year before that
happens, but that does not make me any less concerned, since there
continued to be rather unpleasant surprises for some of us, who wanted
to work with Ruby/Gtk on Ubuntu?

I think if you want GUI for Ruby that’s stable, etc., it might be a good
idea to look at some of the JRuby integrations. But that’s just me.
GL!
-rp
http://wiki.github.com/rdp/ruby_tutorials_core/ruby-gui-toolkit-comparison

Thank you, for your suggestions. Roger, yours might be particularly
insightful. However, I am more interested in pure X.org, GTK, GNOME and
Cairo versions. It is likely that these will catch up with Apple’s far
too long domination in this area, within a year or so. With all due
respect to multitude of choices, one can find for Ruby GUIs, I strongly
believe the only one that has a chance to minimiye if not eliminate
Apple’s domination is Ruby/Gtk/GNOME on native Linux platforms. But
currently there are far too many discrepancies and bugs in Ruby Gtk
implementation. When, more than a year ago, I was writing the “Ruby/GTK2
Tutorial” (http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/hiki.cgi?tut-gtk) I
discovered many problems in Ruby implementation. You can find most of
the trouble areas in the tutorial table of contents, which I marked with
the exclamation mark signs. I think time has come, to address these
problems, and I am looking for ways to get involved in trying to help
and if possible contribute to the project. However, I am afraid, that
the spirit of the nineties is gone, and what Thomas S. (7rans) said
perfectly exposes the spirit which represents an undeniable problem.

Because of this I believe, that today we would have much better chances
of getting anything done under the umbrella of a well coordinated semi
commercial effort, as Thomas has hinted. But in that case, we’d be
better off addressing also the question of modernising X, and perhaps
take it over from the IBM & Co. bunch, who I believe are doing far too
little in this respect. I am very much in favour of getting Ubuntu’s
Mark Shuttleworth involved. It should not be hard to convince him, that
a Ruby is more superior and a better fit to handle GUI as well as OS
maintenance, and indeed development issues than Python. There should be
enough evidence of that. I believe a strong case could be built on what
I hinted in my opening statement. Namely, that Cocoa’s design is
superior to that of X.org / Gtk. Particularly important fact here is
that Ruby feels very natural and far better implementation language than
Objective-C in that environment. A language like Ruby, would eliminate
most of the unnecessary clutter in Cocoa Foundation library. Also Cairo
should be made integral part of X or Gtk. I guess I am advocating a
substantial rewrites in both Ruby and X, to reflect on the superior
Cocoa design and particularly adopting many of its design patterns, but
avoid the unnecessary complexity, Apple created coupling Cocoa with the
external requirements imposed by the Interface Builder.

Ruby Gnome support is quite ok.

Problem is … the guys are doing this mostly because of fun and love of
ruby.

Gnome upstream doesn’t really support ruby too much - python is much
more favoured. This is more a general statement - I know that some gnome
devs do support and use ruby quite a bit.

If there would be more people willing AND able to contribute on the code
side of things, I am sure things would improve quickly.

Apple has established a niche, and even though Objective-C sucks it will
stay there for a long time to come. (Apple would be stupid to kill their
own niche)