From: Eric Lee Green <eric@...>
Date: 2001-10-26T23:55:13+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23461] Re: Bruce Eckel's opinion of Ruby

On Friday 26 October 2001 04:04, you wrote:
> Eric Lee Green wrote:
> >...
> > Regarding coding in Jython, the tasks that I am doing require low-level
> > programming that requires writing a "C" module to do some critical
> > function. With Ruby or Python I can write a module (and Ruby modules are
> > so much easier to write due to lack of reference counting, which is nice
> > if I know that I'm going to be throwing it away if the concept proves out
> > and we staff up the Java conversion). With Java, I can write a JNI class.
> > With Jython... I shudder.
>
> Why wouldn't the JNI class you write for Java work with Jython
> automatically (or vice versa)?

Okay, I'll take a stab at this.

First of all, I am writing products that are to be commercially released 
products that our company is depending upon for its future. Thus I have a 
rule of thumb: "Only one unstable external technology." If a technology does 
not give me the "warm fuzzies", I don't consider it to be stable. Note that I 
say *external* technology, since the stuff we're writing is obviously 
unstable until we have finished it and spent a month or two shaking it down!

Okay, so let's look at the chain that you're talking about: 
Jython->Java->JNI. Okay, Java->JNI does not give me warm fuzzies in the first 
place on Linux (our NAS is Linux-based, no big secret though never mentioned 
on any of our literature for marketing reasons). Jython->Java->JNI thus makes 
me even more nervous, because I have not attempted to use Jython in the past 
so I don't have any "warm fuzzies" about it.

I guess what I'm saying is that I am quite conservative and do not like a lot 
of new/unstable things in the chain of failure. That may sound strange 
considering that I've been using Linux in mission-critical applications since 
1996, but (shrug) Linux actually removed SCO from the chain of failure (I had 
a lot of problems getting SCO to ever fix any of its bugs). I probably would 
have considered Jython if I hadn't happened to have the Ruby book in front of 
me, had already experimented with drb, knew that it was stable and safe, and 
knew that I could prototype my distributed app pretty much as fast as I could 
type using Ruby. Because as we all know, often prototypes do sometimes get 
deployed at customer sites for purposes of testing/etc., especially when 
we're talking about them giving us millions of dollars if they like the 
concept and want us to go ahead with it. A prototype which is 
unstable....[shudder]. Sorry, the $$$$ involved is just too much to take 
risks there. 

-- 
Eric Lee Green          GnuPG public key at http://badtux.org/eric/eric.gpg
           mailto:eric@badtux.org  Web: http://www.badtux.org
             You do not save freedom by destroying freedom