From: Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@...>
Date: 2007-03-28T01:49:11+09:00
Subject: Re: On Enterprise Ruby

On 3/26/07, Alexey Verkhovsky <alexey.verkhovsky@gmail.com> wrote:
> Fellow Rubyists, Ruby is now mainstream.
> ========================================
>
> Like it or not, we are there. Ruby applications are now developed for banks,
> telecoms, investment companies, newspapers... not just cool Web 2.0 startups
> anymore. Every middleware, operating system and IDE product vendor has a
> dynamic languages strategy. This is a new situation that Ruby community has
> to deal with.

As Yogi would say, "It's deja-vu all over again."

Back in the late-80s/early-90s Smalltalk had made a foothold in many
of those niches, particularly banking and investment, two hotbeds of
Smalltalk usage were Wall Street, and the Banhofstrasse in Zurich.
The driving factor was the need to do rapid application development
which was well suited to a dynamic object-oriented language.  IBM even
had a mainframe Smalltalk for MVS and CICS.

I think what threw water on this was when Java came along, it was
available for no or low cost.  The main Smalltalk vendors (IBM and
ParcPlace Digitalk) were still trying to make big bucks from license
fees. Java started building a large user base which eventually took
most of the wind out of Smalltalks sails.  It's taken awhile for the
realization that Java just might not be dynamic enough to sink in.

So maybe Ruby has a good chance since it combines the dynamic nature
of languages like Smalltalk with an even more reasonable business
model than Java.

-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/