From: Leslie Viljoen <leslieviljoen@...>
Date: 2006-08-15T05:41:46+09:00
Subject: Re: South African Ruby Programmers

On 8/14/06, Berger, Daniel <Daniel.Berger@qwest.com> wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Leslie Viljoen [mailto:leslieviljoen@gmail.com]
> > Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 2:10 PM
> > To: ruby-talk ML
> > Subject: South African Ruby Programmers
> >
> >
> > Hello people!
> >
> > Again, I am asking that any South African Ruby programmers
> > register at my web page:
> >
> > http://mobeus.homelinux.org/eclectica/show/RubySouthAfrica
> > (or the alias, since the first will be phased out:)
> > http://www.lesismore.co.za/eclectica/show/RubySouthAfrica
> >
> > I am hoping to recommend Ruby for a new project but if I am
> > virtually the only Ruby programmer in all of Gauteng, the
> > answer will be a resounding NO!
>
> But, think of the job security! :-P
>
> Seriously, I would think you could take any decent programmer and get
> them up to speed on Ruby in less than a month.  Look for
> Perl/Python/Smalltalk programmers (with C/C++ experience if you'll need
> to write extensions).

I know this, and have also seen evidence of it (the team of Java
programmers who rewrite their huge app in Ruby without prior
experience) - but the clients have specifically asked for all hardware
to be vendor neutral, which means vendor neutral maintainablility is
also very likely to be a priority. I can tell them "people can learn
this quickly", but I'd much rather tell them "people know this". Big
amounts of money make people nervous about new, little known things,
they normally retreat to "safer" rather than "better".

Les