Monday, March 13, 2006

McGovern and others on Enterprise Ruby

Large Enterprises and why they don't care about Ruby: "The funniest thing is occurring in the blogosphere. Lots of folks who write for industry magazines have jumped on Ruby, yet you will never find a single large enterprise that is even considering it. Ever wonder why?"

Some great points here on enterprise adoption of dynamically typed languages, which are on the wrong side of the hype curve, but James M. misses the point to make his. One one hand, I think the basic assertion is wrong, in that I have seen some dependencies in mission critical applications on things written in Perl and Python, not to mention LISP. On the other hand, I think the point about maintenance is decidely in favor of the system that has less code and XML to maintain.

Here's the only part of the hype that seems true- Rails is a better web development framework than any of the Java frameworks that I have tried. Tapestry comes closest. Microsoft and JSF tool driven web development frameworks can be pretty close to Rails on a productivity scale, but there is too much complexity in the actual code there. If you compare the Microsoft code generation with the Rails code generation- I'd rather have Rails write my code. I'd rather maintain code generated by Rails too.

In terms of the seldom considered factors of how much I like coding in various languages- I still have to say to code assist or code sense or whatever you call it when the attributes and methods available pop up after you type "." is a big factor. My first real job involved writing Avenue and Lotus Script. (I am still occasionally maintaining that code base 10 years on.) I was quite overjoyed when Visual Basic gave me the dot power. Losing it again was initially a big deal. The Zen realization that literally anything could go after that dot and still work (hello, method_missing) has made up for it.

3 comments:

Matt McKnight said...

The best comment on James McGovern's latest anti-Ruby hype screeds.

http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=105

Chui Tey said...

Richard Monson-Haefel who devoted 18 months studying the spec and writing a tome on Java WS standards, reminds us that the JAX-WS Emperor has no clothes http://rmh.blogs.com/weblog/2006/03/jaxws_is_bad_ba.html

Given the present state is so bad, it will not be long before a big company calls the lie, and abandons the standard for a rebel framework.

Matt McKnight said...

I agree completely on that one, Chui Tey. Over-engineered is an understatement.

If everything has to be configured, you have made nothing more than another programming language. XML is a sub-optimal programming language. If everything is to be configured, let me configure it in a dynamic language...