From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2006-11-29T13:25:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Is ruby a viable corporate alternative?

On Tue, 28 Nov 2006 08:17:40 -0800, 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
> 
> 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

I can't really answer any of these specific concerns, but I can say that I
think Java is a pain in the butt to program, owing to various kinds of
inconsistent semantics (e.g. the dichotomy between arrays and
Collections). C++, as much as everyone thinks it's a worse
language, is nonetheless easier to program, and I absolutely love
Ruby.

--Ken

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/