From: "S. Robert James" <srobertjames@...>
Date: 2007-03-28T10:05:12+09:00
Subject: Re: On Enterprise Ruby

Image and market share aside (although those are important
considerations), what *real* limitations does Ruby have for large
scale apps ?

1. SOAP.  This is a biggy.  It's the top of my list of "real
hesitations before recommending Ruby".  Large apps need to talk to
other apps.  Often, this is via SOAP.  Now, soap4r is buggy, poorly
documented, and worse of all, has very incomplete WSDL support.

2. Immaturity of Libraries. How many of the libraries that your
project depends on have version numbers < 1.0?  'Nuff said.

And there's also some serious cultural issues:

3. Clever code.  Kent Beck says that when he uses a clever trick, he
feels bad, that's he wasn't capable of using a simple, well known
solution.  Yet I see a lot of Rubyists - esp. Railers - who seem to
get a kick from programatically redefining a class or using
method_missing to avoid a comma somewhere.  Come back to that 3 years
later, and good luck.

4. Arrogance.  All those "databases are stupid, referential integrity
is for wimps, and CIOs should be fired" posts.  Yuck!  To me, the
rampant arrogance, combined with immaturity, is the greatest long term
risk to the health of Rails.  Luckily, there's been a lot of
improvement here, with people recognizing that, yes, if you're
trusting your app with millions of dollars, you can't deal with it
like you do with your blog.