From: benjohn@...
Date: 2006-07-25T18:15:55+09:00
Subject: Proving Ruby's effectiveness


Our company (2500 employees) has a development conference in a few
months. I want to present a talk about the effectiveness of Ruby. I've
been asked (at late notice, grrrr) to give concrete evendence about it's
applicability to different domains, and the productivity that it
provides. I'm not particularly interested in raw computing performance:
I want to show (if it's true) that projects built in Ruby will be:

  Quicker to build,
  Easier to maintain.

If there is a "sweet spot" for which that's true, then I want to be able
to talk about that too, and if there are holes, I'd like to talk about
them.

If you have seen an article that provides evidence of this, I would be
extremely obliged if you could pass me a link to it. Something peer
reviewed would be wonderful, but any reasonably believable research
would be good. I imagine that it would provide measurements from real
project in terms of the dreaded "man days"; "bugs" and "total cost",
etc; and would also give standard code metrics such as cyclometric
complexity, source code size, etc.

Thanks very much for any help,
  Benjohn