ActiveState Ruby?

[Steve Holden]

"Thaddeus L. Olczyk" <olczyk at interaccess.com> wrote in message
news:3aca9899.96034343 at nntp.interaccess.com...
> On Sun, 01 Apr 2001 15:00:08 GMT, "Daniel Berger"
> <djberg96 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I think one of the reasons for Python's
> >growing popularity is the fact that ActiveState has a Python distribution
> >(the other reason being O'Reilly).
> Hi. Just passing through and thought I would clear up some
> misapprehensions about Python.
> Anyone who thinks that ActiveState has played a major role in Python's
> growth has their head up their ass.

Not, perhaps, strictly true. They employed Mark Hammond, who has labored for
years on his PythonWin IDE and related Win32 libraries. Since the
ActiveState distribution includes a bog-standard BeOpen 2.0 as well as all
Mark's major Windoze contributions, I recommend that Windows users install
ActivePython since it's easier than putting the bits together manually.
Availability of ActivePython may well have contributed to Python growth int
he Windows world.

> The growth in Python took off at least a half year before ActiveState
> produced anything ( most linux distro still distribute 1.x versions
> ActiveState didn't release anything untill 2.0 ).
> After 2.0 the distribution on python.org was available.
> There was a short time when the BeOpen site was down, and
> the only place to find the latest version of python was at ActiveState
> and most downloads came from there. Otherwise  it just seemed more
> convinient to download BeOpen's version. Plus if BeOpens version
> disagreed with ActiveStates on a point, who do you think would have
> the correct version?
>
Since BeOpen is no longer supporting the Python language development, do you
think it will matter? The future of the language is now (allegedly) in the
hands of the Python Software Foundation, and ActiveState do seem to be
supporting that quite actively.

credit-where-credit-is-due-ly y'rs  - steve