From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-11-12T04:57:33+09:00
Subject: Re: McGovern Likes JRuby...

--------------enigEFD7DACF68E5849317241C09
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Right, I'm dropping my Java troll hat for a change.

Joel VanderWerf wrote:
> Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
>> http://duckdown.blogspot.com/2006/11/thoughts-on-smalltalk.html
>=20
> James McGovern blogged:
>> By the Ruby community acknowledging the greatness of Java, they could
>> gain the following capabilities for Ruby:
>>
>> Kick butt concurrency
>>

Alright, I'll let him keep that.

>> Better deployment tools
>>

Maven fanboy. Run for the hills, kids. Ant isn't bad, but it's rather
baroque and also one of the worse abuses of XML there is. (Completely
unvalidable, etc.) Now Maven 2 trying to play apt-get for Java libraries
is an abomination. (E.g. heavens forbid you get a distribution with
dependencies shipped.). And if you need to reconcile dependencies by
hand (from behind a firewall, for deployment), manually downloading gems
isn't noticeably worse than manually setting up JARs (which you'll end
up with unless you feel like creating a local Maven2 repo mirror, which
is mere hassle.).

>> A lot better documentation
>=20
> How does James McGovern think that running ruby on a JVM improves the
> docs? It's still the same language...
>=20

Well, if you take core libraries and exhaustive tutorials, maybe. But
enter the realms of open-source libraries, and you get documentation
quality of all scales on both sides, with all the usual symptoms. (To
wit: 90% of Apache documentation, and the tons of projects - on both
sides - that barely have API docs, and definitely not human-readable
"how to use" documents.)

>> A more secure platform
>>

Integrated security policies I'll grant there are. However, I don't
think I'd find five people at the department I work at (Java Knowledge
Base) that have actually ever seen the insides of a policy descriptor,
and more than two that did so outside a course on Java security.

>> Access to a larger community
>>

A fragmented one too, and absolute values mean nothing - you just want
the significant projects sufficiently covered.

>> Type safety
>=20
> Whuh? Ruby's not type safe?
>=20

No, it's not. Ruby is strongly typed (all objects have a known type
which doesn't undergo implicit conversions to try and make an operation
succeed), but not type-safe (no verification of whether an object is of
a correct type for an operation until it's too late - NoMethodError).

That's "userspace" type checks notwithstanding, those aren't part of the
language though.

David Vallner


--------------enigEFD7DACF68E5849317241C09
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc"
Content-Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="signature.asc"

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (MingW32)

iD8DBQFFVitUy6MhrS8astoRApnIAJ9pl9+0QBjXlL38rtSbml+re1PKVwCZAauH
61Kh7INQya1tZZMWcNJFY20=
=WzB5
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--------------enigEFD7DACF68E5849317241C09--