[LRUG] FYI: Ruby for Symbian OS Released

[Eleanor]

On 21 Nov 2006, at 12:58, Murray Steele wrote:
> I remember there being a big song-and-dance-routine in the Python  
> community a few years ago when Nokia* did the same for Python.  And  
> yet for all the hoo-ha, I can't think of anything good / useful /  
> big coming out of it for the Python community.  For example games  
> for phones seem to be actively advertised as Java games nowadays,  
> as if that some-how makes them better.  It might be silly but it  
> does point at a certain ubiquity of J2ME in that area in that you  
> don't see the word Python in those full-page ringtone / games /  
> wallpapers ads (unless it's for a wallpaper of a python for the  
> niche ophiophilist market).
>
> Maybe the effect was felt in the Python community in ways I  
> couldn't detect (by virtue of not being part of it anymore), so if  
> anyone who knows more than me about this (e.g. anything at all) can  
> re-educate me otherwise, by all means feel free.
>
> Muz
>
> *or was it Symbian? I think it was just for Nokia phones, but maybe  
> back then only Nokia phones ran the Symbian OS

For Symbian, and last I followed that project it was Python 1.5.2 but  
without many of the standard libraries. There's also Perl for Symbian  
available from Freepoc (spot the former Psion Series 5 addict).

This probably won't do much for the broader Ruby community but for  
those of us working on projects that include support for next-gen  
handsets this is brilliant news as the Ruby advantage means we can  
bring all kinds of goodies to the Symbian platform with much less  
effort than the J2ME crowd. One step closer to the dream of Ruby as a  
universal scripting language for embedded systems :)

Ellie


Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason