From: patrick-may@... (Patrick May)
Date: 2002-03-18T17:43:50+09:00
Subject: we don't have to sell ourselves short... (was Ruby and .NET)

In the Ruby & .NET thread, there seemed to be some concern about Ruby
and the enterprise world.  I think we can give ourselves a bit of
credit.

The wayback machine is built on Perl and C.  How many 'enterprise'
applications need 100 terabyte collections?  How many 'enterprise'
applications have aspirations to archive *every* document ever posted
online, every movie ever made, every song ever recorded?  If they
built that with Perl and C, think about what they could do with Ruby
and C!

'Enterprise' has nothing to do with scale, or quality.  It is a
marketing term for 'shrink wrapped software we sell to an executive
for over one thousand dollars'.  Scalability and uptime all come from
having quality staff, not 'enterprise' software.

Languages like C, Perl, and Ruby will time and time again prove
themselves to be powerful ways of getting alot done.  I think the
..NET's and EJB's should be worried about Ruby, not the other way
around.

~ Patrick May

P.S. article on wayback machine:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/webservices/2002/01/18/brewster.html

P.P.S. A *huge* educational brand's site is currently being migrated
from Vignette Story Server to php.  It's amazing what you get when
switch from spending tons of money on licenses to spending tons of
money on service.