From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-06-06T12:44:10+09:00
Subject: Re: I love Ruby - But how bright is Ruby's Future?



Francis Cianfrocca wrote:
> Because I respect you, I'm going to respond as if you're serious.
>
> It may be that you haven't ever worked with the kind of person I'm
> talking
> about. He's the one programmer in a hundred who can do the work of the
> other
> ninety-nine. I probably wouldn't waste him on a Cobol or a VB project.
> I'd
> certainly consider him for Lisp. If I really had to code something in
> Brainfuck and had made the decision rationally, then I'd certainly
> consider
> him for that as well. (But wouldn't assembly language be better than
> BF for
> almost any purpose other than demonstrating BF's specialness? And yes, I
> would definitely use my superstar on an assembler project.)
>
> I can't speak to your experience. But in mine, the very best of the
> best are
> seduced by the inherent interest of the project, the opportunity to work
> with people they respect (and it's HARD to win their respect), and
> above all
> the chance to learn something new. The choice of programming language is
> something they care about (I exaggerated upthread), but it's far from the
> top of their list.
>
> I asked one of my favorite guys to do a Ruby project three years ago.
> He had
> never heard of Ruby but he took the project. Just as I expected, he was
> right up to speed on Ruby almost immediately (essentially in one
> night) and
> did more production-quality work in less time than all of the experienced
> Rubyists on the project. With these guys, it's like their brains are
> orthogonal to language issues.
I was that sort of programmer a few decades ago. There are only so many
opportunities for "them" (formerly "us"). It took me something like 30
years to outgrow assembly language. :) IIRC I wrote my last line of
assembly code (well, Forth for the 80186) in the early 1990s. I went
directly from microcode to Perl :).

At this point, I'd learn Ruby if there was someone else around at work
who was interested in it. I don't suspect that will happen any time
soon. It was tough enough to find another person interested in R, a
language ideally suited to some of the tougher problems I work on.  

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com