From: Peter Fitzgibbons <Peter.Fitzgibbons@...>
Date: 2005-08-20T00:33:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Specifications

>
>PT> In article <20050818193338.C0A2533D5F@beryllium.ruby-lang.org>,
>PT> Dion Almaer <dion@almaer.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>Who needs specs when you can just have exegenesis/apocalypse style 
>>>fluffing around? :)
>>>
>>>A spec would be good from a "business" sense. I know of a few large 
>>>companies that are worried about "betting on one Japanese fellow".
>
>
>PT> I don't get it, what's the issue?  Ruby as it exists in it's
current 
>PT> form is usable - How would a language spec make them feel any 
>PT> better?  I could
>
>I think a language needs a formal specification.
>
>If you have mission critical applications it's a little bit hard to
take this "C is the specification" argument.
>
>
>I posted into the past that i really don't like it that matz break
compatibility in minor release changes. Suddenly returning a "[]"
instead of "nil" might be a small change but it can cost millions of
dollars if it happens in a critical environment.
>
>If we had a specification for this it might restrict matz to make
changes like this, just because it feels better. This works for a hacker
language but i know that many companies got afraid when hearing about
this.
>

Hm... Unless there is a company that is running about 10,000,000 (yes 10
million) lines of ruby, then I doubt that it could spend millions on a
language change like returning [] instead of nil.  Um.. Unless they're
updating language version majors without any testing.  BTW: Microsoft
releases language version majors with every new Visual Studio.  Guess
what?  They've "broken" code compatibility all over the place, up and
down the library stack.  You can't even convert a project from one
version of VS to another without major pain.

So, I don't think this makes Ruby a "hacker" language.  Any hacker can
use ANSI C or C# or PHP or Python or Perl or Ruby and make a mockery of
the language and version updates.  A professional programmer and
>>vendor<< will know that producing a valuable product for his/her
client requires responsibility, building stability into their product,
and following a protective process in upgrading.

I have worked at many companies, each who have been spending anywhere
from $100's to $100,000's on software development, and I'll tell you, to
any one of them, updating a production system without testing more than
once or on purpose would have been immediate dismissal, even from the
most forgiving of them.  Backups are a rescue here, but that's no
excuse.

So, all of you making money on Ruby and maybe Rails, you are NOT using a
hacker language (BTW: at its inception, languages like C++ and VB were
"hacker" languages).  I don't hear in the group any of you asking how to
dance around the question of Ruby's respect in the development
community.

What do you think?

Peter J. Fitzgibbons
Applications Manager
Lakewood Homes - "The American Dream Builder"(r)
Peter.Fitzgibbons@Lakewoodhomes.net
(847) 884-8800 



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