On Apr 5, 2012, at 3:34 PM, Dan Farrand <d...@greenrivercomputing.com> wrote:
> I am not a a contributor to MacRuby, but I have been interested in using it. > Without Apple sponsorship, I have very little interest in MacRuby. I think Matt has already said all that needs to be said on that subject. There are many application environments, both commercial (like Unity3D) and open source (like Mono), that have enjoyed a healthy and robust existence without Apple's help. Apple is a wonderful company that makes many fine things (and I'm obviously biased), but it would be frankly silly to suggest or even imagine that no one else is capable of making fine things on their own. One also need look no further than the MacPorts project to see one that was started by Apple but became FAR more successful and motivated once the community became seriously involved with and took over the development process, so there's a counter-point to your somewhat pessimistic viewpoint right there. I personally wish Matt and anyone who wishes to join him in charting MacRuby's future course the very best of luck. As he notes, it's already a fairly stable platform and a lot of good work has already gone into it: It's hardly starting from scratch with just a few gossamer dreams and ill-defined notions to hang its future on! You have some great stuff to start with. Even better, it's open source and the doors are therefore open to anyone who wishes to participate. No hosting situation is perfect, of course, and should there be any impediments to such participation then I'm sure they will rapidly resolve themselves given the plethora of alternatives for hosting the bits, the bug reports, the community discussion portals, and so on. Those are mere implementation details, however, and it's far more important that the project have some clearly defined goals and people willing to drive those goals since, as I can personally attest, the heart and soul of any open source project is the people involved with it on a day to day basis! Not the source code. Not where the sources are hosted. The people. There simply has to be some collection of people who constitute an actual community since it is communities, and the essential need that humans have for creating them, that binds any project together and leads to its longer-term success. Individuals themselves may come and go, just as I left the FreeBSD project after many years of involvement with it, but as long as there is a strong community of like-minded individuals remaining then the project will live on and continue to prosper (I like to think that FreeBSD is far more successful today than it was when I left it). Focusing on the past merely leads to pointless navel-gazing. Think about the future you want to create, as Matt says, and you'll be on the right track. Finally, I also think that integration with Xcode, while certainly not a bad thing to maintain going forward, should also not be held up as such a holy grail that it proves an impediment to thinking up new and even more exciting ways to rapidly prototype applications in an interactive, interpreted development environment. MacRuby is not Objective-C. It can be compiled, and that's great, but it also lends itself particularly well to Smalltalk-style interactive development environments that, I believe at least, have been sadly lost in time as IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse rose to prominence and became the new norm. What about seeing software more as connectable ICs, with lines and arrows denoting control flow, for example? What about dragging and dropping stuff from palettes of code templates rather than writing endless amounts of boilerplate? These are the sorts of concepts that a project like MacRuby could easily explore, should it choose to do so, rather than simply trying to clone or track existing development metaphors. The Rails developers certainly proved the notion, and proved it with rather spectacular success, that you could start with a flexible and easily learned language like Ruby and then create a de-facto DSL on top of it, making things that were formerly somewhat complex almost absurdly simple. Whether you like Rails or hate it, you cannot argue the fact that this essential idea struck a strongly responsive chord with a lot of web developers, so why not seek to create something similar for app developers? Both individually and collectively, the readers of this list are in charge of where MacRuby goes next. If you like the vision that Matt is proposing, by all means follow him. If you don't, github also supports any number of possible forks, the word "fork" no longer having the somewhat pejorative meaning it once had, either, but rather representing the opportunity for one or more individuals to demonstrate another possible vision of the future the old fashioned way - by creat ing it! - Jordan
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