From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2006-11-13T01:56:24+09:00
Subject: Re: McGovern Likes JRuby...

David Vallner wrote:
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>> Well ... I know how *I* feel about it:
>>
>> http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/2006/11/nitty-gritty-of-ruby_11.html
>>
> 
> Impose JRuby on the world? I have my doubts Sun would even try - the
> time of Java hype marketing is past. And I don't think JRuby will be as
> earthshaking to both the Ruby and Java worlds as some people make it out
> to be. By adopting JRuby as the implementation language for the Java
> platform, you are also partially dropping the advantages that keeping to
> Java has (existing infrastructure, experience, tool support). In the
> end, it might be a useful tool on both sides, but I don't see paranoid
> managers adopting Ruby en masse just because it has a J prepended to it
> - not all of them are that gullible.

You seem to imply that folks will either use Ruby or Java, but not both. 
In JRuby, it's safe to say they'll complement each other. I don't expect 
that in five years all app servers will be written in Ruby from the 
ground up. But I do expect they'll use Ruby in surprising and 
significant ways to tie together other code and components written in Java.

And I've been talking to a lot of those paranoid managers. News flash: 
they're far more likely to adopt JRuby than Ruby when they have an army 
of Java folks and server rooms full of Java app servers. And guess what 
else: many of their developers would rather leave or use Ruby than keep 
on writing struts actions and ant scripts.

> 
> That the JVM become the primary runtime for Ruby is somehow laughable.
> So far, it hasn't become the primary runtime for any major programming
> language that isn't Java, evidence would suggest that this remains the
> case. It would be foolish for performance reasons if nothing else, a
> dedicated optimised VM will do better when treated with Ruby
> idiosyncratisms like pervasive use of closures.

I'll dodge this one by saying this: there are a lot of good VMs out 
there that could be put to use running Ruby code, and from what I know 
about Ruby there's nothing that would prevent them from running 
extremely well. Ruby isn't that idiosyncratic, and most of its 
idiosyncracies are just syntactic sugar.

-- 
Charles Oliver Nutter, JRuby Core Developer
Blogging on Ruby and Java @ headius.blogspot.com
Help spec out Ruby today! @ www.headius.com/rubyspec
headius@headius.com -- charles.nutter@sun.com