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.