From: Gregory Seidman <gsslist+ruby@...>
Date: 2007-03-28T02:32:09+09:00
Subject: Re: On Enterprise Ruby

On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 01:06:20AM +0900, Alex Young wrote:
> Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:
[...]
> >Whenever someone says "not ready for the enterprise", the E-word usually
> >stands for "large companies whose core business is not software".
> >
> >These places typically have post-technical managers in charge of strategic
> >IT decisions, lots of money to throw at IT problems (much more than a Web
> >2.0 startup), and a zoo of systems and applications, spanning the last 25
> >years of the history of computing. Some of those applications need to share
> >data and otherwise cooperate.
[...]
> Defined like that, the statement "Ruby isn't ready for the enterprise" 
> is just as easily reversed - "this enterprise isn't ready for Ruby."  I 
> say this because there certainly are enterprises using Ruby, and using 
> it well, now - you're actually in a better position than me to know the 
> truth of this.

Of Ruby and "the enterprise," which do you suppose is Mohammed and which is
the mountain? Thinking in terms of enterprises needing to wise up and take
advantage of what Ruby/Rails has to offer for their own good is at best
altruistic and at worst self-delusional. There is an advantage to us, the
early adopters (where early is defined here as before it got enterprise
attention), hobbyists, and such, if we can get enterprises (i.e. the "large
companies whose core business is not software" mentioned above) to use
Ruby/Rails to a significant extent. That advantage is a wider range of
profit opportunities with greater job security.

I actually wrote a lot more after that paragraph, but it wound up being
just a tangent. Ultimately, it is in our best interests to bring Ruby to
the enterprise, and to do so actively rather than allowing someone who has
*their* best interests in mind do it for us. Rest assured, there will be a
variety of attempts to make Ruby acceptable to the enterprise, and some of
them probably won't smell too good. Passively hoping it won't happen or
hoping that someone else will get it right is the best way to let it go
wrong.

> Alex
--Greg