From: Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@...>
Date: 2006-06-06T21:30:13+09:00
Subject: Re: I love Ruby - But how bright is Ruby's Future?

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Giles: this is a Ruby-language forum, and the title of the thread is "I love
Ruby but is its future bright?" As interesting as your comments are about
business, I don't want to stray too far offtopic.

I'd like Ruby to become as good a language and language-implementation(s) as
possible. And to do so quickly would be a big plus. One way to do that is to
get more smart, well-motivated people to work on the language. And one way
to do that is to expand the number of people who use the language. If this
happens, then the big question will be: can Ruby survive success? And that
will depend on the leadership skills of Matz and the more important people
in the community.

If it doesn't happen, then Ruby will continue to be what it is today: a
lovely language with applicability to a reasonably interesting class of
problems.

To your questions about Rails: we sometimes use pieces of ActiveRecord. The
rest of our stuff is done in pure Ruby, using a framework very similar to
Rails without most of the edge features. It usually profiles at least ten
times faster than Rails (often twenty times). The web servers are written in
a mix of Ruby and C++. Made sense for us because we've been writing
high-performance servers for distributed apps for a lot of years so we had a
lot of good knowledge to draw on.


 <gilesb@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/5/06, Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I used to make my living selling my
> > programming skills but now I'm mostly a buyer of the programming skills
> of
> > others. I guess that makes me a crappy business person.)
>
> Well, I would have no way to assess that as either true or false, but
> certainly that wasn't what I meant.
>
> It does sound, however, as if you have some crappy business people for
> customers. (No offense, so do I!)
>
> > What I meant was that Python has achieved a degree of respectability in
> > corporate environments that Ruby hasn't yet. And this doesn't happen by
> > itself, and it certainly doesn't happen just because a language is
> > particularly well-done or particularly nice for programmers to use. I
> think
> > you may be underestimating the degree to which technology choices in
> large
> > organizations are driven by the need to reduce the perception of risk.
>
> No, I am completely aware of that, I'm just firmly of the opinion that
> working for large corporations is detrimental for the sharpness of
> programming skills.
>
> > It's
> > not universally true that a programmer who "delivers the goods" will get
> to
> > pick his technology.
>
> True, but although it isn't **universally** true, it is true for a
> number of excellent programmers who also make very good business and
> marketing decisions. Other things are true for other programmers, but
> I don't care, because those other programmers aren't my role models.
> I'm firmly of the opinion that the answers you find are much less
> significant than the questions you ask. Consequently I'm only willing
> to ask the questions that will make me an excellent programmer.
>
> > But the question gets asked here time and again: who cares if people in
> > corporations don't use Ruby, as long as I can use it on my own projects?
>
> Hold on -- I have herad that question, but you're assuming everybody
> only works on large corporate projects. In my case, I don't want to
> work for large corporations, but I do want to be paid to use Ruby.
>
> > Entirely valid. But if you really like using a language, wouldn't you
> want
> > to use at work as well as at play? And to get that kind of acceptance
> for
> > Ruby will take some serious advocacy. With the rise of Rails, that may
> be
> > starting to happen, but it's too soon to tell.
>
> The ability to use Rails is a major priority for selecting my next
> job. But it only takes serious advocacy if you're choosing customers
> who have prioritized minimizing risk over maximizing results. If
> you're only even willing to consider customers who prioritize
> maximizing results over minimizing risks, the advocacy effort becomes
> nonexistent.
>
> > Because I'm a businessperson, I'm always struck that people would
> question
> > the value of achieving greater acceptance for anything.
>
> Fair enough, you're thinking of marketing, obviously increased demand
> can be a good thing. But you have to realize the dangers of a
> commodity-oriented model when you're running a service business. You
> don't want to compete on price. (Chad Fowler's book "My Job Went To
> India" explains why.)
>
> > Different strokes
> > for different folks, of course. But at some level, I have to think about
> > protecting the investment that I make in people who learn Ruby while
> working
> > on my projects, which I've done several times in the three-plus years
> I've
> > been shipping commercial software written in Ruby. Although I personally
> > love programming in Ruby and do it whenever I can, your points really
> throw
> > the larger business questions into relief.
> >
> > (For the little that it's worth, we shipped a pair of apps in Rails, and
> > coudn't get past the performance issues, so we now ship web apps in
> > handwritten Ruby with our own handwritten web servers.)
>
> Using parts of Rails, or entirely handwritten?
>
> Are the web servers in Ruby?
>
> > And to your point about programmers who deliver the goods: I've been
> > privileged at several times to have some of those magical crazy people
> > working for me who can deliver almost anything on almost any schedule.
> And
> > although the sample set is small, those I have known all share this key
> > characteristic: the programming language DOESN'T MATTER. An individual
> who
> > really understands software development doesn't pick a programming
> language
> > to concentrate on. He's productive in anything you tell him to use, and
> he
> > doesn't particularly care either.
>
> I think on this point at least you and I are totally in agreement.
> It's good to understand Language X but it's much better to understand
> programming.
>
> --
> Giles Bowkett
> http://www.gilesgoatboy.org
>
>

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