Ruby Programming Language (alternative Ruby home page) | Hacker News Reader

Ruby Programming Language (alternative Ruby home page)

rubylang.info

70 pointstelemachos38 comments

I found this GitHub issue/comment really fascinating:

"Hi. I'm Jean-Denis Vauguet, one of the maintainers of ruby-lang.org (working on the French flavour).

After discussing a little bit with other active VIT members, it seems I stepped up to port ruby-lang.org to a git-based, static website generation process too. I'm using Jekyll, extended with custom tasks for generating, parsing, Sass compiling, multi-lang support… I'm also in contact with postmodern, who started its own port a few days ago (idea: merging good ideas and focus on one project). So there is kind of a "official" effort going on, despite we did not published yet (hopefully soon).

In the mean time, your port looks great :) But I do see it is not quite a "port", but an overhaul, with a different organization (links to third-party websites, for instance). I can't speak for the Ruby officials, for I'm not, but I do see this may result in a duplicated effort, and a confusing "content-hydra" (two websites with the same name, newcomers puzzled, duplicated content, etc.). So what should we do about it?"

https://github.com/rubylang/rubylang.github.com/issues/4

It would be interesting to see how a major site like ruby-lang.org being managed and run through git would turn out.

I moved my own site to Jekyll recently. With modern javascript techniques a "static" site can still be pretty interactive without any dependencies on fragile software plumbing. It's also really fast.

I've been using NestaCMS for a year or two now, kinda feel it's the best of both worlds. Low-tech enough that I can just write a markdown file in vim if need be, but the flexibility to do something dynamic if the need arises.

Hello. I started rubylang.info and I feel that I should say this. I had contacted the team who maintains ruby-lang.org and it is what actually inspired me to create this so called "fork". The way they're doing things right now is discouraging and much of a hassle for anyone not in the "team" to contribute the slickest bit of change. This new site solves this problem.

While the official website has it's flaws it actually doesn't look too bad. This design however uses the color red way too much and blocks such as the news feed take up too much space. I also don't see how this would directly benefit the Ruby community but that may be my personal opinion.

The great thing about this new site is that you can fix it!

Except that I don't want to, nor do most other developers out there. Not because they necessarily lack interest but because there's a pretty good chance they're busy enough already.

You can say the same thing for any OSS project but then why is open source so damn popular? If you don't want to contribute then that's your own decision. No one is forcing you to do anything.

Because people contribute whenever they're interested in it, this is great in many different ways. However, using an open source project as an excuse to not do the work yourself (regardless of the reasons or the problems) is just silly.

Using open source as an excuse to do the part of the work that you are best qualified for, and opening up the rest to respective experts, is a pretty good idea.

and that was my main goal.

The other day there was some discussion about how some information on the Ruby home page is out of date or incomplete, so I guess this is a response to that. Well, good, you can't have too many "home" pages for a programming language. This should make things much less confusing for newcomers.

Concur. Fix the process around the existing web site. "Forking" should be a last resort.

A collaboration with the maintainers of the original site is likely to inherit its problems. Creating a new site is much easier than trying to modify people's behavior. The duplication of effort is not a significant issue for a project of this scale.

A similar thing happened with Rubyforge -> Gemcutter. It was a pretty fast and clean transition. This is really how the Ruby community rolls. The "official" whatever is whoever is doing the best job of it at the moment.

You know what? I agree.

Ruby is going the way of Java and for the same reasons. Rails originally made easy things easy and hard things possible. Now, for novices, easy things are harder. Java went the same route largely as a result of the debacle know as J2EE.

Java suffered the problems that it did because there was the "one true way" of J2EE until Spring eventually came along and made it (marginally) better.

Merb provided that for Rails. Now there's no more Merb.

</anecdote>

The point: we, the Ruby community, are suffering our own success. Popularity leads to people leads to bureaucracy leads to mediocrity. See "JSF".

As a result, this "fork" makes sense to me. Unfortunately, it's just a drop in the bucket. Ruby.next is coming and it's called Javascript (by way of Node) and Clojure (by way of those Rubyists who are LISP obsessed and still use Java).

The point: we, the Ruby community, are suffering our own success. Popularity leads to people leads to bureaucracy leads to mediocrity. See "JSF".

Isn't this (rubylang.info) a great example of lack of bureaucracy? Someone isn't satisfied with the current ruby-lang.org, so instead of trying to go through lots of bureaucracy, they rather make something completely new?

The current bureaucracy is flawed. It is not community owned but government by a "core maintainer" group where decisions are not publicize nor is there a roadmap anywhere.

I went through the necessary communication channels BEFORE I started this and what I experienced from that is the result of rubylang.info.

You have some strange definitions of "concur" and "agree"

A link to the catalyst for said discussion:

http://www.rubyinside.com/official-ruby-site-not-so-good-524...

And the attached HN discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839580

I see your vision, but first of all I really think that this should be done in coorporation with the ruby-lang.org. Also, you need a designer; please don't take it personally, but the design looks like 30 min in Photoshop. Sorry for being harsh, but I love Ruby community and I would not stand a ugly site being the entry-point. The ruby-lang.org site is actually really beautiful, it's just the irrelevant information on it that is the problem.

Also, you need a designer; please don't take it personally, but the design looks like 30 min in Photoshop. Sorry for being harsh, but I love Ruby community and I would not stand a ugly site being the entry-point. The ruby-lang.org site is actually really beautiful, it's just the irrelevant information on it that is the problem.

Wow. There are so many wrong things about your comment I don't know where to start. You're borderline insulting with a criticism that has zero information apart from the fact that you hate it, and then you act like you had to do it to save the Ruby community. And then, icing on the cake, you announce that the official Ruby site is "is actually really beautiful" like an absolute truth.

Be constructive. If you can't, have some respect for other people's effort and keep your hate to yourself.

That was not hate, that was opinion. Maybe it depends on your own mental state (bad day) when you read that, read it again some other day. If you get the same feeling, then I would say we bring our opinions in different ways. Don't pain me as a wanna be saviour please, I've been doing Ruby since 2005 - I got right to tell what I believe in for Ruby community.

I laud his inititiative. If herding cats takes talent, herding documentation-averse cats must be even harder. Best to make an attempt, get buy in and feedback, and move forward. If the people at the top say "bugger off", oh well. If they say, "Thanks for starting this, let's see where we can go from here", then not only are they being decent people, but also constructive.

I think the site looks fine, as in neither bad nor awesome. Similar for the official site. Nothing special, just different.

Fine is never enough.

Fine is usually more than enough since fine is usually better than 90% of what's out there. I've been reviewing design shops for a site redesign and most of them not only have less-than-fine* websites, but their clients' websites are equally less-than-fine.

* i.e. bland, uninteresting, a mess under the hood, mildly unusable, ...

Evolutionary - no fine is not enough. If you can choose between bad, fine, great - you pick great unless it's takes too much resources (time/currency/etc). In this case the constraint are "open source workload" which is quite massive nowadays - then consider a "fine" site hacked together in an hour a good solution on this problem is "not enough".

Now it seems the picked path for ruby-lang is open contribution, that is not just "fine" - it's great.

The example Ruby code jammed into a narrow column like that doesn't do much do demonstrate how beautiful Ruby code can be.

Agreed. One of the things i liked about ruby-lang.org was the prominent display of demo code.

I think root of the problem is, do we want a site that reflects in-the-trenches Ruby developers' reality, or a site that reflects the Ruby core team's vision?

It seems that there's room in the world for both, they are different needs and perhaps trying to satisfy them with one website is a mistake.

Learn Ruby the Hard Way was not written by Zed. It's Zed-supported. Different author though.

Off topic, but Umberto Eco's novels in English are still written by Umberto Eco, regardless of the translator.

For a book about "MOAR CODEZ!" you're giving Rob Sobers short shrift.

Rob seems to have done a great job translating the python-ness to ruby-ness, but Zed did the hard work -- he created the approach and wording for Python.

I haven't tried to compare them, but my interpretation of Zed's comments is that most of the text is still Zed's.

Edit: You might be short shrifting Eco's translator. Reading his stuff is hard enough, translating must be a royal PITA. </tongue-in-cheek>

Eco's work is tough. So, yes, maybe I'm undervaluing the credit of "translator".

From the official site:

Content available in English, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia, German, Italian, Czech, Bulgarian and Turkish.

Internationalization is one key thing the alternative version is missing.

The project was started less than 48 hours ago. Isn't quite finished yet. :)

Call this "Ruby Links" and make it less a temporary clone, more a permanent and vital resource.

Easy on the glow/gradients, buddy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com