This week in Ruby

I am subscribed to Israel.rb - the local Ruby mailing list. It had a nice start about a year ago. The guys even had a few face to face meeting but it seems due to lack of interest that faded away culminating in the recent post titled This group is dead, now what we gonna do?

The other, more interesting message a few days ago was from Adam Fine, the guy who started the group wrote an overview about the various implementations of Ruby and their state. It was quite a good reading and it even made it to the weekly report of Antonio Cangiano.

That brings me to what the Perl community might learn from the recent success of Ruby:

• Ruby has RubyForge
• There is a Windows installer called RubyStack that includes the whole stack of applications needed for Ruby on Rails development, including, well everything.
• Ruby has the above mentioned This week in Ruby message which make it easy for people who are not deeply involved in the community to follow what's going on.
• The also struggle with occasional (?) bad publicity. This one was about the state of Merb - yet another MVC framework.

I can't say if any of this has contributed to the success - especially not the last one - but I think they help.