From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2006-07-25T18:28:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Proving Ruby's effectiveness

benjohn@fysh.org wrote:
> 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.

This is probably only tangential to what you need, but if it is of
any value, here is an article from last year:
http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1895,1778695,00.asp

I suspect that numbers and stats such as your people want will be
hard to come by. My impression is that 99% of what is out there is
anecdotal reports and handwaving. (Frankly, outside the Ruby world
as well as within it.)

Here's an idea: Take 3-4 small programming problems (the kind you
might see in an undergrad ACM contest). Assuming you are proficient
in Ruby, challenge their people to do the same in Java or C++ or
whatever language. Time everyone to the minute (letting everyone
finish to his satisfaction). Run all programs against a comprehensive
test suite (to show how the other guys missed all the edge cases). ;)
Finally show how the Ruby code is 4 or 5 times as compact.

Just a thought.


Hal