From: Charles O Nutter Date: 2006-08-18T07:15:58+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby is exploding onto the scene as Java did at the end of 1990s ------=_Part_175152_4234889.1155852956177 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline On 8/17/06, Chad Perrin wrote: > > On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 06:43:49AM +0900, Francis Cianfrocca wrote: > > On 8/17/06, Charles O Nutter wrote: > > > I think there's a short answer that would please almost everyone: Ruby > > makes > > >development cheaper, more fun, and more compelling than it has been > since > > >the late 90s. > > > > As interesting as your whole argument sounds, it's light on specific > > business drivers. Enterprise IT is in the middle of a secular > > transformation that will fundamentally change the playing field for > > traditional vendors. You've correctly perceived that an explosion in > > development productivity is under way. At the moment it's being spent > > in an orgy of wheel-reinventing that Java (through the miracle of > > well-focused corporate sponsorship) managed to largely avoid. But > > along with the miracle of corporate sponsorship came the horror of... > > Java itself, and there is an argument to be made that it couldn't have > > turned out any other way. > > I'm inclined to agree, re: Java. My point wasn't about Java, it was about what heavy backing like Java received can do for a language. Java was arguably not the best language for many jobs it got applied to; and yet look at it today. Wouldn't it be an amazing thing if the same corporate push, the same level of resource commitment was made for a truly excellent language like Ruby? Or would a flashing neon Ruby sign sound the death knell for the language we know and love? I obviously think it's the former. > > > The right model for Ruby advocacy may not be Java but rather Python > > (or Linux). If so, then success will come from organic growth and > > slow, steady success, largely in projects far from the enterprise > > mainstream (which these days is all bogged down thinking about > > governance models for SOA- talk about expending cycles that don't > > deliver business value!) > > I'm inclined to agree here, as well -- most thoroughly. I'd rather see > that sort of organic growth, in part because it would likely ensure that > the potential for disillusionment when the realities of the language are > separated from the marketing is minimized. I think that Perl could be > added to the list of examples of the "right" model (it has had strong > successes, after all, and is still used widely and more so every year), > and that Logo should likely be listed amongst the examples of "wrong" > ways to do it (it's a victim of its own success as an "educational" > language: everyone thinks of it as a toy for children, while at least > one implementation of it is an easier-to-learn, truly powerful Lisp > dialect, and hype is what killed it). Again, the only analogue to Java is in what hard-core corporate backing can do for a language. C# is another example...only marginally better than Java, but already becoming very popular. Why do we keep making the same mistakes time and time again? Why can't it be Ruby this time? There's another simple answer: Java was invented at Sun during a largely closed-source era. C# was invented at Microsoft, a notoriously closed-source company. In both cases, they still subscribed to the idea that in order to profit from something you had to own it...anything "not invented here" was absolutely out of the question. But times are changing. Both companies have started to embrace alternative languages, and both have professed a belief in and support for Open Source (though to a far greater extent at Sun). These companies and many like them are realizing that ownership is only a small part of the big picture, and an ultimately very expensive part. Thus, both Sun and Microsoft have declared their respective platforms to be "multilingual" now and into the future, though they're still hedging their bets on which languages will rise to the top. Obviously, I think it will be Ruby. Others may disagree. And please remember that Ruby by definition can't fall into the Java or C# trap because it already IS "not invented here". By hooking up the corporate wagon to the already fast-moving Ruby train, both the Ruby world and the corporate world would benefit: the Ruby community and language would continue their evolutionary, organic growth--already proven to be a very succesful and compelling model--and the corporate world could provide funding, resources, support, and peripheral enhancements to help take Ruby that "last mile" into the heart of the largest organizations--arguably their strongest reason for existence. IBM has been reaping great success from a similar situation with the open source Java world, using a language and platform they do not own. The same could happen for a community-driven language like Ruby, once we convince the PHBs that we really do know what we're doing. -- Contribute to RubySpec! @ www.headius.com/rubyspec Charles Oliver Nutter @ headius.blogspot.com Ruby User @ ruby.mn JRuby Developer @ www.jruby.org Application Architect @ www.ventera.com ------=_Part_175152_4234889.1155852956177--