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by crazydiamond 5785 days ago
Unnecessarily critical and not amusing. To bring up jruby and rubinius for someone starting out in ruby??? Why not also confuse him with Macruby ?

I develop more for fun .. i develop in ruby 1.9 and test to see it works in 1.8.7 also. No big deal!

I use "gem" for installing gems. Not bundler. No need to confuse someone new with RVM and ask him to play with all versions of ruby till he finds the one that suits him.

Its like asking a Java developer to try out all versions of Java starting with the 1.0 version, or asking a python developer to try jython and IronPython in addition to the 2 or 3 current versions.

What about perl. Should a new developer try out perl 4 and perl 6 too first ?
1 comments
gisikw 5785 days ago
The article is meant to be taken as satire, but do consider that if you're a new developer and you go a'Googling, you're going to encounter JRuby, and Rubinius, and Macruby.

It would be silly to throw all of these items at a new developer, and no teacher in their right mind would ever do that.

But if you're trying to pick up the language on your own...that's what you'll see.

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philwelch 5785 days ago
Unless Ruby's your first programming language, I don't see how you can be that astonished by the fact that there are multiple implementations of the same programming language.
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pyre 5785 days ago 

  > but do consider that if you're a new developer and you go
  > a'Googling, you're going to encounter JRuby, and Rubinius, and
  > Macruby.
Then the solutions are relatively simple:

1. Forcibly prevent people from developing new Ruby interpreters, Ruby frameworks, and alternatives to popular Ruby tools.

-- or --

2. Force Google to adopt a old-style Yahoo / DMoz approach to internet search so that a Google employee can sort/categorize all of these things manually for presentation to the user.

The crux of the article seems to be that too many choices can be overwhelming to a newbie, so we should restrict everyone's ability to choose so that inexperienced, new developers don't hurt themselves (or run screaming due to information overload / confusion).

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