Steven said:
IMO, the Ruby site redesign guys are on a much better track. Who
really cares whether NASA uses Python? One thing I learned from having
to sit through too many software marketing presentations is that
organizations like NASA are to software what the Library of Congress
is to books. I finally started interrupting presenters to ask
something like "Do you realize that *all* of your competitors have
LANL on their peer-pressure slide too?" Most actually didn't!
There's an argument to be made that language advocacy, and "selling"
Ruby (or Python or Lisp or whatever), is distasteful.
There's also a counterargument suggesting that the language and its
community will be better off for the greater exposure and mainstream use.
I believe that language marketing itself is fine, though it can be
poorly or distastefully done. People looking to code Ruby for a living
are helped if HR people or recruiters or whomever have heard of Ruby;
people currently trying to persuade their coworkers or boss to adopt
Ruby are helped if Ruby is better known and people are assured that more
Ruby hackers can be found if a bus takes out the one or two Rubyists
they know.
But there is the counter-counterargument that it is more important to
attract the right kind of people, not simply large crowds of
indiscriminate coders. And that poor marketing (e.g., My language is
cool, your language is a mouse poop sandwich) will turn people off.
I'd like to think that if you make the intrinsic strengths of Ruby
obvious then it will (continue to) attract the people who will help make
it better (by keen observations, code submission, library creation),
which in turn will draw the attention of the more practical-minded.
But it may be that "success story" blurbs are still needed to win over
project managers and such.
--
James Britt
"In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly
universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by
uncertainty cannot be the truth."
- R. Feynman
