Whither SmallScript? (was Re: Integer micro-benchmarks)

[David Simmons]

"David Simmons" <pulsar at qks.com> wrote in message
news:Pk8G6.23922$Jh5.23242637 at news1.rdc1.sfba.home.com...
> "Andrew Hunt" <andy at toolshed.com> wrote in message
> news:slrn9ehfbt.frk.andy at workbench.toolshed.com...
> > > Out of the dirth of scripting languages available,
> > > Python and PHP are at the top of our well-known candidate list. There
> are
> > > parties who have either expressed an interest in or are working on
> languages
> > > such as Scheme, JScript, and Basic.
> >
> > Have you taken a look at Ruby?
>
> Yes, I have indeed. I've known about Ruby and monitored it for a couple of
> years now. I have the Ruby book and I've watched its attention rise and
then
> fall relatively quickly.

Updating my earlier post now that I've gone and re-examined their site,
events, and newsgroup.
---
Hmmm... Maybe it just has seasonal lulls.

There Tampa conference this fall will be an interesting indicator. I have
the distinct impression that a large if not dominant portion of the user
base is in Japan. I wonder why their conferenced wasn't held there?

> Its newsgroup/discussion lists are pretty dardn
> quiet and the website is not particularly active -- maybe I've just not
been
> monitoring the right areas?

I just went a renewed my link to its newsgroup and I see it has quite a lot
of activity in recent weeks. My news service is not archiving more than a
month or so on this group so I can't see further back.

I also notice a number of familiar folks posting in their group...

>
> >
> > It's remarkably clean, dynamic, fully OO, and open source.  I find I can
> > wrote more code in Ruby faster, and with fewer errors, than any other
> > language I know (and I've tried quite a few).
>
> That's high praise indeed.
>
> SmallScript is itself a complete and rich language, which I not so humbly
> will suggest to you exceeds the facilities and ease of use of Ruby.
>
> But truth to tell that is not the real issue in selecting the scripting
> languages on the above list. The principal criteria are first and foremost
> popularity (user-base and depth/breadth of the frameworks/codebase) and
> second the clarity and capacity of the language. Perl would have been on
the
> list but, given a choice, it didn't meet my second criteria.
>
> >
> > For more info, try:
> >
> > www.ruby-lang.org
> >
> > and
> >
> > www.rubycentral.com
> >
> >
> > Enjoy!
>
> Cheers!
>
> -- Dave S.
>
> >
> > --
> > Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC.
> > Innovative Object-Oriented Software Development
> > web:   http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com   email:
> andy at pragmaticprogrammer.com
> > --
> > Books by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:
> >     "The Pragmatic Programmer" (Addison-Wesley 2000)
> >     "Programming Ruby" (Addison-Wesley 2001)
> > --
>
>