[MacRuby-devel] Re The Future of MacRuby

Thu Apr 5 23:21:43 PDT 2012

I am surprised to hear Laurent has left Apple. I don't know what motivated
the change, but I am sure that he is working on something great. Good luck
Laurent!!!

While I have a lot of faith in the open source community and think growing
a larger pool of contributors is critical for the long-term viability of
macruby, the libauto issue is a simple example of how internal decisions at
Apple can have profound effects on macruby's future. That worries me.
Without anyone promoting macruby from inside Apple, they can shut
compatibility with x-code off with an update, add months of work to remove
libauto-dependency because they decide to deprecate GC or otherwise alter
the programming universe in some unforeseen way. Since Apple is an
unapologetic, iron-curtain of secrecy, with a propensity to stop short and
change direction (remember when it seemed like macruby would be on iOS?), I
can only imagine how many hacker years the macruby community will burn
while trying to hit an ever-moving target.

Apple, think different--don't be evil!
--Tim

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 9:02 PM,
<macruby-devel-request at lists.macosforge.org>wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
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>   1. Re: Re The Future of MacRuby (Jordan K. Hubbard)
>   2. Re: The future of MacRuby (Chong Francis)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:45:48 -0700
> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh at apple.com>
> To: "MacRuby development discussions."
>        <macruby-devel at lists.macosforge.org>
> Subject: Re: [MacRuby-devel] Re The Future of MacRuby
> Message-ID: <F0B5203E-88F8-4897-A68B-DF292DAF428D at apple.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>
> On Apr 5, 2012, at 3:34 PM, Dan Farrand <danf at 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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>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2012 12:02:30 +0800
> From: Chong Francis <francis at ignition.hk>
> To: "MacRuby development discussions."
>        <macruby-devel at lists.macosforge.org>
> Subject: Re: [MacRuby-devel] The future of MacRuby
> Message-ID: <F1865A0E-F52D-466E-BE74-ECC255AAF290 at ignition.hk>
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>
> Thank you for your update. It's sad that Apple seems abandon the MacRuby
> project, but this is also a chance to bring MacRuby closer to what we (as
> developers and users) need instead of what Apple want.
>
> I certainly agree that removing libauto is a primary goal, as OSX and iOS
> are both going to a place with no GC. I afraid my C/C++ skills is not quite
> helpful on developing core MacRuby, but i would definitely like to help on
> wrapping API, integration and documentation.
>
> Francis
>
> Matt Aimonetti ? 2012?4?6? ??6:06 ???
>
> > Many of you have been wondering what is going on with the MacRuby
> project given the lack of up-to-date releases and overall communication.
> > I feel we owe you some explanation.
> >
> > As a lot of you have noticed, our de-facto project leader Laurent
> Sansonetti has been M.I.A since October 2011, his last post to this mailing
> list being
> >
> http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2011-October/008168.htmlannouncing MacRuby 0.11 really soon.
> > His last commit was a change of license back in October:
> https://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby/commit/ac2a7a8e678d19e44d3c64a9508a8370d082dca2
> >
> > Laurent is fine. As described on his twitter http://twitter.com/lrz and
> LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/sansonetti accounts, Laurent is no
> longer with Apple and is clearly also no longer directly involved with the
> MacRuby project on a day-to-day basis.
> > Laurent is currently busy with another project and and hopes to someday
> be able to contribute to the MacRuby project again.
> >
> > While no one on this list can speak for Apple, and Apple as a company
> does not tend to comment on its future plans or intentions, I think it's
> reasonable to imagine that Apple would be more than happy to have the
> MacRuby project decide for itself what its destiny is and how to achieve
> it.  If they did not want the community to be involved or drive such a
> process, they would not have released MacRuby as open source or created the
> project infrastructure to facilitate it.   It is time for us to stop
> looking to Apple to provide guidance, leadership and coding for the
> project, in other words, and take on those challenges for ourselves!
> MacRuby is already very powerful and comparatively stable as a development
> platform, now it's time for us to take things to the next level.
> >
> > I personally think it will finally allow us to communicate and
> collaborate on the actual process of development as it occurs, rather than
> the previous practice of simply seeing code appear from some hidden,
> internal branch which was driven almost exclusively by a single person
> >
> > Doing all of this in the open should lead to far more people being
> interested in the project, not just as users but as developers and leaders.
>  No one rushes to fill a position that is occupied by someone else, but now
> we have a vacuum to fill, and that can be a good thing in terms of
> encouraging more people to step forward.
> >
> > Here is how I see things and I would love to hear more about what you
> guys think.
> > MacRuby is a great project, but:
> > the target audience & projects aren't clear
> > the target platform (OS X) isn't the one we all really want to target
> (iOS)
> > Cocoa's API is awesome but not user friendly/easy to grasp
> >
> > What I'd like to suggest is the following:
> >
> > 1. Define clear goals for MacRuby that we can easily evaluate:
> > Focus primarily on making MacRuby the tool to use for quickly
> prototyping OS X and iOS applications.
> > Remove dependency on libauto so MacRuby can run post Mountain Lion and
> on iOS.
> > 2. Increase the number of contributors:
> > Define areas of contribution:
> > implementation itself (mainly requires C, C++ knowledge)
> > prototyping focus (templates, wrapper APIs, modules, tools: a full
> ecosystem aimed at being more productive)
> > documentation (getting started, guides, FAQs, wiki, demos, hacker guides)
> > support
> > empower contributors:
> > move the website to github for easier contribution
> > better release process and roadmap
> > better process to review pull requests & give commit rights
> > 3. Improve communication:
> > start an active and official chat room (IRC, campfire like or something
> else)
> > open discussions about plans for the project and progress made
> > better collaboration with other Ruby implementation teams (Rubinius,
> JRuby, MagLev and of course Matz/C Ruby)
> >
> > Let's not forget that MacRuby is and will remain a free Open Source
> project and that means we need your help and support.
> > Without you, this project doesn't mean much so please voice your opinion
> and if you decide to do so, become an active participant to MacRuby's
> success.
> >
> > I would like to thank Apple for their historical support and Laurent for
> starting this project and all his work so far. Without those contributions,
> MacRuby would never have existed and the project will more than welcome any
> future participation by either Apple or Laurent.
> > At the same time, I don't think the future of this project can or should
> rest on the shoulders of a single corporate entity, or that of a single
> individual.  That does not encourage the kind of broad participation, or
> the kind of overall longevity (in the form of future generations of
> contributors) that Open Source projects really need to survive over the
> long term.
> > Finally, I'd like to make clear that I see myself more in a role of a
> facilitator than a technical leader on the order of what Laurent was. This
> role has been left vacant for more than 6 months now and needs to be filled
> by a group of people with greater technical skills than mine. Additional
> contributors are therefore more than welcome to join the team, and their
> support will be as much appreciated as it is needed.
> >
> > Finally, in addition to the already numerous great MacRuby contributors
> and soon to become contributors, Evan Phoenix (Rubinius) agreed to act as
> an advisor for the project.
> >
> > So, MacRuby community what do you think?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > - Matt
> > _______________________________________________
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> > http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
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