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RubyGems' Module Count Soon To Surpass CPAN's

Posted by timothy on from the we-finally-know-who's-counting dept.

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."

5 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Irrelevant statistic... by pedantic+bore · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?)

    --
    Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
    1. Re:Irrelevant statistic... by freedumb2000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. Never mind the quality, feel the width by petes_PoV · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
  3. DLL hell by Jay+Maynard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
  4. Re:Quality has never been a concern of Rubyists. by Bigos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.