Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition
by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Andy Hunt
Pragmatic Bookshelf

Ruby is one language I've always been curious about. Reading the tutorials has always been a breeze, the language is almost readable for your average human being, and I've always been impressed by the developer community- active and enthusiastic- that surrounds it.

I want to be part of that, is what I think to myself.

So, when the 2nd edition of the justifiably-famous Pickaxe book came up for review, I jumped at it. Weighing in at 800-odd pages, the author, Dave Thomas, has added around 50% or more to his previous edition. Mr. Thomas, if you don't know of him, has been an author for programming books for some time, the earliest example of which I'd found being a style guide for Smalltalk.

Excited to get going, I downloaded the latest Windows installer for Ruby. This latest release contains, in addition to the core binaries themselves, the excellent SciTE editor, Freeride [an IDE] and several libraries.

The installer completed its work, and I fired Freeride up.

Nothing. Or next to it.

What I got was a console, stating the path was wrong or didn't exist. Now, this was an odd thing, because I'd had an earlier release of Ruby [possibly 1.6] installed with the same OS, albeit on another hard drive, which worked. Scratching my head, I wondered what might possibly have changed and whether I'd the foresight to have kept it on disk somewhere. I hadn't.

Nothing for it then, I figured. After submitting a couple of bug reports, I considered what to do. I know, I thought, I'll simply install it on my Debian partition and that will be that.

Oh, my Lord.

The entire point of having a Linux installed upon your desktop is to have a system that can be customized to your liking. To promote choice and have the power to do things. More than some Linux advocates, the Debian folks believe that in spades.

So I need to ask: Why, oh why, did you break the unitary Ruby package into 34 separate libraries? Why do you bury it to the point where a humble user- such as myself- can't, well, use it? You've got Python up, front and center, but Ruby? Why ever would someone want to use that?

Choice, indeed.

Any given Operating System reflects the requirements of the majority of its designers, especially in Linux, and perhaps not a little of bias creeps in, too. Like Microsoft choosing for you what you're to play with, Debian eschews and seemingly buries Ruby in favor of other platforms. I realize that for those who are Debian diehards, this arrangement adds to that choice aspect. Not for me. To me, it was simply in my way, probably the most damning thing you could ever say about a Linux.
Its not like it hasn't come up, guys.