From: Tom Marsh Date: 2006-06-05T22:35:39+09:00 Subject: Re: I love Ruby - But how bright is Ruby's Future? ------=_Part_28993_29319007.1149514533818 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline I'm still new to the language myself, but I'm comming at it as an enterprise web developer (Java/.Net). The killer app for Ruby, for me at least, is Rails. Rails has got so much right with regards web development it makes you question how Sun got it quite so wrong... or at least not as good. However, I can't see big JEE houses switching to Rails any time soon. There are two aspects of Ruby that destroy Rails for enterprise computing. The good news is, that they are both fixable. The first is performance. Ruby might be the same age as Java, but Java developers are 10 a penny and that means that Ruby is more expensive, both in terms of the hardware required to run it, and people required to develop it. In order for it to get its foot in the door it needs to massively reduce its TCO. If Ruby's performance could get close to Java then the reduced development costs would be enough to justify the risk of taking on another new language. The most obvious way of doing that is to compile it. I know there are projects to do this already to CLI, bytecode and machine code. My two cents is that Ruby should aim for something like Obj C or LISP: native code with a heavy reliance on a portable runtime environment. The biggest mistake I think Ruby could make in this respect is the continue to rely on third party groups to add this much needed functionality. Choice is good, but it makes it even harder for enterprise to latch on to something as they have to sit down and evaluate each solution or worse hire consultants to tell them which solution to take... shudder. The second is the effect of soft/duck typing on the IDE. Theology aside, code completion reduces the learning curve, reduces bugs and increases productivity. All of these things are a Good Thing (TM). I fully understand that for a complete novice that intelligent IDEs can hinder overall understanding, but no more than garbage collection - and what high productivity language would be without that? Would allowing the language some syntactic sugar to merely decorate an object with a type, which could be completely ignored by the runtime, really be that much of a bad thing? I know Ruby isn't necessarily going after the enterprise market, but it's so neat that I think it would be a waste if it didn't. What makes it so unique is that the syntax scales with the project. No one would routinely write a shell script in Java as they would in Perl, but no one would think that writing a word processor in Perl would be a good idea either. Ruby fits for both... at least syntax does. On 05/06/06, Mat Schaffer wrote: > On Jun 4, 2006, at 11:09 PM, Hector wrote: > > I've been trying to pickup Ruby for a few months now. I've written > > a few > > good programs that help me at work with SAN/Unix Administration. I've > > also run into a few dificult(for me) programming problems. I like to > > figure things out on my own so I never post questions in forums like > > this, this probably contributes to my bad programming skill, but > > that's > > besides the point. > > > > I'm at a point where I'm asking myself if it is worth the trouble > > for me > > to learn Ruby. How many people are really writting Ruby? Are there any > > truly robust, good applications being written in Ruby? How well are > > Ruby > > libraries being maintained? I know there is a lot of documentation for > > Ruby but I find it hard to find very specific docs. Python seems to > > have > > a whole lot more doc and many more books exist for Python. Does Python > > have a greater following. I love Ruby but I don't want to waist my > > time > > with a laguage that may not have a future. > > > > I don't really care about learning 10 programming languages. My brain > > wouldn't be able handle it. I want to learn 1 or two languages and > > learn > > them well. I know Pascal very well, I know Perl pretty well, now I > > would like to get away from Perl and so I started out leaning > > Python. I > > think Python is ugly and not very fun to write. I then jumped into > > Ruby(a whole lot of fun!) but I don't get the warm and fussies about > > Ruby's lasting power. > > The first thing I'd say here is that Ruby just got the cover of both > Dr. Dobb's and Linux Journal, which is a pretty big statement of how > far it's reaching. Can't say the same for many languages. As for > materials, it's worth it to note that (1) Python's a little older, > (2) Ruby started in Japan so there's a lot of Japanese documentation > out there that hasn't been translated yet. > > But I think the most important thing you should note is how much fun > you have programming in Ruby. If you're enjoying it, you can trust > that a lot more other people do too. And that's a REAL "killer > app". (David Heinemeier Hansson of ruby on rails talks about > happiness a lot in this respect) > > -Mat > > ------=_Part_28993_29319007.1149514533818--