>Not too appealing to have to install that much crap on one's system just to play with a new language.
Ironically, this is what I thought about C# and Visual Studio when I used it 20 years ago. Boo was much easier to get started with back then, when you just wanted to try out .NET 2.0. It took me a few minutes to download and install .NET Framework (~20 MB) and SharpDevelop (~15 MB) versus five CDs of Visual Studio 2002 which took an hour or so to install on the machines of that time. And yes, I already skipped the installation of the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) documentation which as far as I remember already took an hour alone.
For some reason the installation of a development environment for Java was also much easier than Visual Studio, i.e. one had to download Java Runtime Environment (~100 MB) and unpack it, and then download Eclipse IDE (~100 MB) and unpack it. When you downloaded both archive files already it took a few seconds to unpack it and double-click on the eclipse.exe.
Boo is also integrated in SharpDevelop [1] which is an IDE for the .NET framework. I used it because I did not want to spend an hour to install Visual Studio on my machine back then. When I look at the releases page the MSI install packages are around 15 MB, which is much smaller than Visual Studio was in mid-2000s.
My guess is the audience of this readme are not the users of the programming language but people who want to work on the programming language.
The current landing page lists features [1], and if my memory serves me the original landing page 15-ish years ago did not primary focus on an install guide. I can't check right now, since Wayback Machine is still down.
What also could happen with repository readmes is, that the sections devoted for explaining the language moves to github pages or a landing pages hosted somewhere, and the sections with install guides stay in the readme, as they are useful for people who want to contribute to the github repo.
Very nice to see some progress here. I think "CSS Ruby Annotation Layout Module Level 1" saw most work around 2013/2014, there are also specifications for ruby that are part of XHTML and HTML 5 standards.
Even when ruby markup is popular with south-east asian scripts I mostly want to use it for interlinear text or textspan-level inline annotations for a software to learn languages.
I remember with the ruby specified in XHTML standard there were ergonomic issues when ruby is written, i.e. it's nice for interlinear text markup to not have to close HTML tags. Also there were issues where people did not understand what the differences between mono ruby, group ruby and jukugo ruby is (correct me if I remember it wrong).
Ruby seems to be not implemented well in browsers, some ruby-related tags were deprecated, the specification posted is part of the restoration of these tags [1]. But last time I checked there was interest of all major browser manufactors to implement ruby standard properly.
Radical constructivism is related to the work of the neurobiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (they are not called constructivists but attributed as main proponents), and the biophysicist Heinz von Foerster.
A deep rabbit hole which started for me when I read Paul Watzlawick in the late 90s.
(the German Wikipedia article about it is much more detailed than the English one; I guess it's good to read using machine translation)
>Not too appealing to have to install that much crap on one's system just to play with a new language.
Ironically, this is what I thought about C# and Visual Studio when I used it 20 years ago. Boo was much easier to get started with back then, when you just wanted to try out .NET 2.0. It took me a few minutes to download and install .NET Framework (~20 MB) and SharpDevelop (~15 MB) versus five CDs of Visual Studio 2002 which took an hour or so to install on the machines of that time. And yes, I already skipped the installation of the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) documentation which as far as I remember already took an hour alone.
For some reason the installation of a development environment for Java was also much easier than Visual Studio, i.e. one had to download Java Runtime Environment (~100 MB) and unpack it, and then download Eclipse IDE (~100 MB) and unpack it. When you downloaded both archive files already it took a few seconds to unpack it and double-click on the eclipse.exe.