RubyGems' Module Count Soon To Surpass CPAN's

mfarver writes "According to the data gathered by modulecounts.com, the total number of modules checked into RubyGems (18,894, and growing at about 27/day) will probably exceed CPAN (18,928, and growing about 8/day) this week."

Irrelevant statistic...

[pedantic bore]

It doesn't matter how many modules there are. It matters how many solid, well-documented modules there are that will continue to get updates and support.

I have no opinion over how much goodness there is in CPAN versus RubyGems; maybe RubyGems is really pulling ahead. But out of nearly nineteen thousand modules, how many really matter? (and how many are just another XML library that's just slightly different and incompatible with the bajillion other XML libraries already out there?)

Re:How many of those are maintained

[Lazy Jones]

The idiosyncrasies of Perl 5 get very annoying.

Like what? I can't really think of anything annoying enough to bear mentioning, except perhaps that typos are hard to find with warnings off (and sometimes with warnings on as well).

everybody is switching to more modern languages like Python and Ruby. At my job (a scientific institute), we're ditching Perl 5 for Python.

Ruby is certainly modern, but Python? It's a poor choice IMO when it comes to fixing Perl's biggest problem, threading support/concurrency due to its GIL, some Ruby implementations fare better. We'll stick to Perl for now, our parallelizable problems are generally tackled using Gearman and apart from a lack of decent programmers, we haven't found any real issues lately.

Never mind the quality, feel the width

[petes_PoV]

Personally I don't care how many modules any repository has, just so long as the ones I want to use work properly. That will always be my primary measure of success, followed closely by how well they are documented and then by how easy they are to find and use.

Re:Prototyping and Small Projects

[Anonymous Coward]

Huge sites like Twitter or Facebook have special needs that are unlikely to be there for 9 out of 10 other sites. Sure, it's an honor to have "your" language picked at some point for such a large scale / high availability service, but they will eventually switch to something else as the technology evolves, or the needs of the site change, and so on.

Bottom line: if Twitter or Facebook used Ruby at some point in time for certain things doesn't mean it will be good for you and your site. It means it has certain qualities and you should research whether they're useful to you.

DLL hell

[Jay Maynard]

I sure hope RubyGems isn't the utter DLL hell that CPAN is. The only time I tried shipping a product based on CPAN stuff, I wound up shipping the entire bundle as one, because there's just no way to download it from CPAN and depend on having the exact versions of the modules you developed with available - and when they're not, you're stuck in a messy cycle of upgrade dependencies and API incompatibilities that are almost impossible to resolve.

Re:Irrelevant statistic...

[freedumb2000]

I am a huge ruby fan, but I must agree. Much more relevant would be a graph with module count and factoring in development activity. In reality, a huge number of the gems are orphans, or come never out of alpha.

Re:Quality has never been a concern of Rubyists.

[Bigos]

The fact that Ruby and Rails make bad programming practices possible doesn't prove anything. The same can be said about any language. I'd rather apply something that has been already said about Lisp. Ruby and Rails are programmer amplifiers, making performance of bad programmers worse, and good programmers even better. Monkey patching can be a very powerful approach, if used properly. It makes possible to write very readable code. It's not so much about changing your code but rather extending it. It can be a very useful technique if used properly.

After 10 years?

[Viol8]

"I've been using Perl for over ten years now, and I find that I'm still learning something new about how to use the language in fascinating ways--pretty much every day."

If thats the case then either you never learnt it properly in the first place or the language is so hopelessly over complicated that it really needs to just go away and die peacefully. Its a programming language, not a dissertation by Wittgenstein - it should be logical, clear and simple.