From: Jason Roelofs <jameskilton@...>
Date: 2006-12-15T03:41:01+09:00
Subject: Re: FYI - Ruby related article/blog on Reddit front page

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I guess I should have expounded on my use of the word "professional".
Everything you say, Dave, is right, but we are forgetting the even larger
community that decrys Ruby as too slow and a "hobbyist language," that is
"not fit for enterprise (*shudder*) use". I myself have use Ruby in a
professional project, so I am not saying anything against that, but more of
those people that I run into and deal with that just don't understand Ruby
because it's too young and slow, usually comparing it to Perl.

Also, the issue that it's something else that needs to be installed has been
a hindrance to the adoption of the language in larger companies, while Perl
and Java are automatically installed on any server. This is why JRuby is
such a great project (as most people have realized and hell is the basis of
the project IIRC) and it will help put Ruby in a more "professional" light
to the rest of IT.

I wasn't trying to say that Ruby is not to be used professionally yet; the
language has definitely proved itself many times in such environments.
However, to get more people (especially the Perl guys) to even try the
language, these improvements need to be made. Then there will only be the "I
like Perl better" argument, for which we can reply "Your loss."

Jason

On 12/14/06, dblack@wobblini.net <dblack@wobblini.net> wrote:
>
> Hi --
>
> On Fri, 15 Dec 2006, Jason Roelofs wrote:
>
> > To be honest, I found the blog post pretty much right on. Ruby is a
> great
> > language, the best language I've ever used, but it still has serious
> issues
> > to be worked out, #1 being an official language spec and following that
> > having a proper VM to take care of speed issues. I have looked through
> the
> > 1.8.x interpreter code and frankly it's stomach-churning, with most of
> the
> > crap in the 3000+ line parser.y file, however the method of writing
> > extensions for Ruby 1.8.x is the cleanest and IMO the best designed API
> > ever. I'm not sure what's going on with YARV, but I will say that I see
> lots
> > of promise from Rubinius and JRuby promises to be the tipping point of
> > massive Ruby adoption across servers and desktops alike.
> >
> > I'm not worried though, because of posts like this and work like
> Rubinius.
> > People have realized an upcoming problem an are working to solve it
> before
> > it becomes a nightmare.
> >
> > And at the same time, none of this is really to be blamed on Matz or any
> of
> > the core Ruby developers/maintainers. Ruby was Matz's personal project
> and
> > now that it's become the language of choice for many, many programmers,
> it's
> > time to clean it up into a professional tool.
>
> Ruby is a professional tool, and has been for years.  The 23
> (twenty-three) in-print Ruby books that Maki brought to show us at
> RubyConf 2002 in Seattle were, I think, not specifically written for
> non-professionals.  Also, while Ruby is a personal project of Matz,
> that's not to say that there haven't been collaborators on the
> language; and Matz has been, as far as I know, working on it full-time
> for years.  So "personal project" does not mean "spare-time project"
> or "one-man project" (though that wouldn't necessarily preclude any
> level of accomplishment).
>
> It's important to examine all the issues surrounding the interpreter,
> but we needn't rewrite the history of the language.  Whatever eval.c
> and parse.y do or do not look like, Ruby has been used by professional
> programmers for serious purposes for quite a while.  And, I might add,
> by non-professionals, and non-professionally by professionals, and
> just about every other permutation.  That's always been one of the
> coolest things about Ruby, to me.
>
> > The future of Ruby is bright!
>
> So is its past -- and present :-)  Happily, it's not a zero-sum game:
> JRuby and Rubinius and YARV can be great, and Ruby from 1993 to now
> can *also* be great.
>
>
> David
>
> --
> Q. What's a good holiday present for the serious Rails developer?
> A. RUBY FOR RAILS by David A. Black (http://www.manning.com/black)
>     aka The Ruby book for Rails developers!
> Q. Where can I get Ruby/Rails on-site training, consulting, coaching?
> A. Ruby Power and Light, LLC (http://www.rubypal.com)
>
>

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