From: Jon Egil Strand Date: 2006-10-20T05:46:08+09:00 Subject: Re: Is anyone using Ruby for 24/7 financial applications? > > management would like to hear that someone else is already > using it for a similar purpose. > Greetings. If I was a manager trying who would consider your suggestion I too would be concerned with stability, as your managers obviously are. But also I would be concerned with correctness. "Is this unknown ruby thing crunching the numbers correctly?". I'll try to answer that question through my experience in financial apps. Background ---------- Although not a 24/7 service, at Mercer I build and maintain multiple mission-critical financial applications in Ruby. We roll about 10e6 USD through this suite on a yearly basis, which is quite a lot considering in our market. Clearly, the financials must be computed correctly. Among the reasons Ruby was accepted were: - development speed. Solve this problem sooner rather than later. The c#-alternative would easily have doubled development time. - less code => fewer bugs. I showed how to write something i C#, then showed the same in Ruby. I can't give you the example, but it concerned text-munging and enumerables among others. Both examples were readable, no golfing, but the difference was substantial. - unit testing. My managers were not up to speed on unit-testing. I showed them how in both ruby and c#, and they loved it. This gave them the assurance that the program would calculate correctly also when implemented in Ruby. It's strange, you never really have to prove this when using C#/Java/..., correctness is somehow assumed to be an implicit feature of compilation. Any developer knows this is not true, but it's not the developer we are convincing, it's the manager. And the manager, understandably, want's to cover the uncertainties. To sum up, dev-speed and program quality were the winners. Hopefully they can persuade also your managers. Good luck. -- Jon Egil Strand Phone: +47 98232340 jes@luretanker.no