From: Rob Biedenharn <Rob@...>
Date: 2006-11-29T01:43:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Is ruby a viable corporate alternative?

On Nov 28, 2006, at 11:20 AM, Mr P wrote:

> Our team uses Perl for almost 100% of our projects, as we have for the
> past 10 year or so. At that point we broke from the C/C++ herd and
> never looked back. Our productivity has been the best in the
> corporation since, and we hear nothing but complaints and bad-mouthing
> from the Java/C++ cadre since their design and  implementations are
> typically 5-10X what ours are..
>
> Anyhow- as the team director, I'm always *looking ahead*. Although  
> Perl
> is still serving us well, I'm thinking for the benefit of our
> developers ( to get more languages in their personal toolkit ) as well
> as making productivity improvements through OO design and the ruby
> environment, I'm starting to talk up and promote Ruby as the NEXT
> language.
>
> This REALLY set off a firestorm from the Java folks, They are already
> they are trying to undermine us with comments like:
>
> o you'll never find any developers to support it, there are almost  
> none
> in the USA

I'd point to the 300+ that actually made it out to the RubyConf in  
Denver as just an example of how silly this argument is (and how many  
are subscribed to this list as another...)

> o you won't like anything that comes out of Japan (this comment from a
> country that was conquered by Japan and still harbors a lot of
> resentment, so I sort of discounted that comment! )
>
> o its not gaining popularity and will probably die out

HA!

> o might as well just use Java

It has been commented (at least quoted by someone at RubyConf) that  
there is a surprisingly small overlap between the libraries available  
for Java and for Ruby -- they have tended to be used to solve  
different problems.  Depending on the problem space, you might  
propose a contest between Ruby and Java.  If you would have used  
Perl, then you can certainly use Ruby (there's even a close match in  
command-line options on the interpreter between these two).  I've  
used Perl for many years and quite heavily the past 16months, I've  
been using Ruby mainly in the context of Rails, but have been  
'forcing' myself to use Ruby for the same kind of "little" tasks that  
I used for my introduction to Perl years ago.  (Except this time I'm  
replacing Perl most of the time instead of awk/grep/sed.)

> ... and so on..
>
> Anyhow, if you all can provide me with websites on Ruby stats vis-a- 
> vis
> other languages, trends, successes, etc., I'd like to go into this
> battle armed!  The break from the herd 10 years ago was very
> productive, and my impression is that Ruby would have similar results.

If your team accepts Perl, there's no reason that you couldn't start  
using Ruby right away.  Assuming that the team understands object- 
oriented programming (even the way it's done in Perl ;-), the  
transition should be an easy one.

-Rob


Rob Biedenharn		http://agileconsultingllc.com
Rob@AgileConsultingLLC.com