I really like the language and used to reach for it as a first instinct, but nowadays it almost lost its mindshare with me.
I understand that there are open bugs that are tricky, but I get the very serious impression that the core Ruby devs simply don't care about Windows at all (a bit like it used to be with git). Bad move, I think.
Perhaps I'm living in a linux-nerd bubble, but why would anyone even use ruby when targeting the Windows platform? Seems like .NET would be a more appropriate choice across the board (be it for web or Windows application development).
I can't imagine the type of pain involved in deploying Ruby code into production in a Windows environment, that just seems insane. This is all to say, maybe Ruby isn't the best choice for a Windows developer. If one simply enjoys the Windows experience in general, at the very least, if I were developing Ruby in Windows, I'd expect to use a *nix VM via SSH thru cygwin or something.
Ruby presents itself as fun-to-code-in programming language.
And it is very much so. That's why a lot people like using it.
Having to setup a whole new environment just to have their fav code tool at hand or having to boot a virtual machine each time just to use it it's much more inpractical, introduces overhead (e.g. sending files on which to work on with Ruby to the VM) and basically, for reasons I am sure you know, does not feel the same than having it installed locally.
As you said the fact that you are advocating that people should not be able to use Ruby on Windows just feels a bit of a *nix nerdy-bubble biased thought.
> Having to setup a whole new environment just to have their fav code tool at hand or having to boot a virtual machine each time just to use it it's much more inpractical
VMs are part of the modern developer landscape and are actually quite trivial to setup. Further, once your VM is built, it requires no further effort beyond the couple clicks it takes to boot up the VM and shell (especially because most developers avoid reboots).
> As you said the fact that you are advocating that people should not be able to use Ruby on Windows just feels a bit of a nix nerdy-bubble biased thought.*
I think it's pretty obvious that I'm not advocating programmers shouldn't be able to use Ruby on Windows, they should use whatever they want, but I think they should also temper their expectations with the reality that Ruby on Windows is a pretty small niche, especially for web development (likely the most common use-case for Ruby).
Except for educational purposes, if you're a programmer, I just don't see a reason to fight one's tools by deploying them in an environment they just aren't optimized for in practice.
OP isn't saying the Ruby community OWES him a windows installer; instead, he is expressing disappointment that the Ruby community doesn't seem to care about its Windows users, which is why he is moving on to some other language--probably Python--that does appear to support the most popular, corporate desktop environment in the world.
The key term there is desktop environment. Ruby is a scripting language most often used for webdev and devops, a section of the industry that is overwhelmingly dominated by server environments running some flavor of linux/unix. Barring very unusual circumstances, I'd have to question the sanity of any developer who deployed Ruby into production on Windows. I'm sure there is a scenario where Ruby on Windows makes sense, but in practice I just can't see why you wouldn't go with something like .NET instead.
Of course, if you just want to get something up and running so you can hack away, by all means, run Ruby on Windows, I just don't think you should expect the latest and greatest on a platform that doesn't see much practical use of the language.
Nothing too alarming, since v2.1.4 is available: http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/
For ages there was only 2.0 available. Being a patch release behind is no big deal indeed.
http://devchat.tv/ruby-rogues/181-rr-rubyinstaller-with-luis...
So, I cannot stay like this, I like Ruby, but I cannot be at the mercy of their lack of attention for Windows, so, as soon Asp.Net MVC 6 is released I'm going to migrate my Sinatra web App to Asp MVC 6.
A lot of other problems I've seen involve confusion over the right version of devkit for the right ruby build, which is made worse by the way devkits helpful install tools just identify all ruby installs and try to install debit by default into all of them rather than having knowledge about what ruby versions the debit version goes with and having default behavior that applies that knowledge.
Latest version there is 2.1.3 at the time of comment:
And they're not releasing pre-compiled versions for any other OS either. Build it yourself [1] or try to be patient until Luis Lavena uploads the Ruby Installer for 2.1.5.
[1] https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller (edit config/ruby_installer.rb to compile 2.1.5 and not 2.1.4)