From: Rich Kilmer <rich@...>
Date: 2002-09-27T00:37:16+09:00
Subject: RE: adding overload to ruby

Well, I'm not Dave (although sometimes I tell people I am at parties ;-)
but,

I have an environment of four different companies working around a
single Ruby framework.  There is a core and many, many extensions.
There are about a dozen folks who are contributing code (not a hundred
mind you) and things are working nicely.  We use CVS and do a proper job
of namespace (module/class) management and rdoc our code well...I don't
have folks stomping on my code (nor do I on theirs).  The biggest
weakness is not having a powerful IDE...but then we in the FreeRIDE
project are working on that...but it will be some time.

BTW: I know of at least two major smalltalk-based billing systems, one
of which is in Verizon.  Smalltalk has similar characteristics to Ruby,
but they are far ahead in their IDE environments (VisualAge and all
that).

-rich

> -----Original Message-----
> From: William Djaja Tjokroaminata [mailto:billtj@z.glue.umd.edu] 
> Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 10:35 AM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Re: adding overload to ruby
> 
> 
> Hi Dave,
> 
> I think you know that "large scale software development" 
> usually implies a big team of people.  For a single-person 
> development, no matter how large the code is, Ruby will be 
> fine, even without private variables, if the person is really 
> good and disciplined in writing code.
> 
> For a large team, the story is different.  I don't want the 
> whole project goes awry just because a person has a pointer 
> error.  (In this regard Java is much better, because there is 
> no pointer).  Do you really think that we can assemble 100 
> people now to write a single, large, Ruby application, 
> and not expecting performance and bug problems?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Bill 
> ==============================================================
> ==============
> Dave Thomas <Dave@pragmaticprogrammer.com> wrote:
> > I guess I'm not one of the 'we' you mention. I used to be, 
> but I'm not 
> > any more. I've discovered that typing issues are rarely the things 
> > that cause bugs in my code. My bug rate in Ruby is no worse that it 
> > was in Java, but I can code it way, way faster.
> 
> > I just delivered the first release of a Ruby web application. I just
> > checked: 26824 source lines of code, developed in 8 weeks. 
> This isn't 
> > a large system in terms of usage, but at the same time it has been
> > used: it currently has over 5,000 registered users, and has clocked 
> > 135,359 transactions to date. I've had one production bug 
> (I forgot to 
> > install a style file). There's no way I could have written this is 
> > Java, or any other language I know.
> 
> > Every now and then, particularly when refactoring, it would 
> be nice to 
> > have type information encoded in the source, but I'm finding that 
> > consistent naming conventions work almost as well. And the 
> benefits of 
> > _not_ having typing greatly outweigh the minor inconveniences.
> 
> 
>