Whither SmallScript? (was Re: Integer micro-benchmarks)

[Andrew Hunt]

On Fri, 27 Apr 2001 09:48:05 GMT, David Simmons <pulsar at qks.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Have you taken a look at Ruby?
> >
> > Yes, I have indeed. I've known about Ruby and monitored it for a couple of
> > years now. I have the Ruby book and I've watched its attention rise and
> then
> > fall relatively quickly.
> 
> Updating my earlier post now that I've gone and re-examined their site,
> events, and newsgroup.
> ---
> Hmmm... Maybe it just has seasonal lulls.

Everything does :-)  The newsgroup is a bustling place, and the posting
volume has been monotonicly increasing pretty much since its inception.
Now, it is cross-fed from a mailing list, and there have been sporadic
outages and delivery problems, so perhaps you just happened to hit it
at a bad time.

> There Tampa conference this fall will be an interesting indicator. I have
> the distinct impression that a large if not dominant portion of the user
> base is in Japan. I wonder why their conferenced wasn't held there?

Because more and more folks in the US are becoming interested in Ruby
and starting to learn and use it.  There was a large Ruby presence at
an open-source conference in Tokyo, BTW.

> I just went a renewed my link to its newsgroup and I see it has quite a lot
> of activity in recent weeks.

Since the beginning of the year, at least.

> I also notice a number of familiar folks posting in their group...

Many of the XP crowd have taken a liking to Ruby.  I find it very useful
for "spiking" to understand a solution.  It's very nearly friction-free
when it comes to refactoring.

> > > It's remarkably clean, dynamic, fully OO, and open source.  I find I can
> > > wrote more code in Ruby faster, and with fewer errors, than any other
> > > language I know (and I've tried quite a few).
> >
> > That's high praise indeed.

That's the idea :-)

> > SmallScript is itself a complete and rich language, which I not so humbly
> > will suggest to you exceeds the facilities and ease of use of Ruby.

I've not seen SmallScript, but I will put it on my todo list.  After all, I 
am a pragmatic sort of person.

> > But truth to tell that is not the real issue in selecting the scripting
> > languages on the above list. The principal criteria are first and foremost
> > popularity (user-base and depth/breadth of the frameworks/codebase) and
> > second the clarity and capacity of the language. Perl would have been on
> the
> > list but, given a choice, it didn't meet my second criteria.

Ruby's popularity is growing internationally, slowly but steadily.  Dave
and I wrote an article on Ruby for the January (25th anniversary issue)
of Dr. Dobb's Journal, we've just had a stellar review on slashdot.org,
the community is growing in size and capability on a daily basis.

It may not be here yet, but it's coming.

/\ndy


--
Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC.
Innovative Object-Oriented Software Development
web:   http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com   email: andy at pragmaticprogrammer.com
--
Books by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:
    "The Pragmatic Programmer" (Addison-Wesley 2000)
    "Programming Ruby" (Addison-Wesley 2001)
--