Ruby

From APIDesign

Ruby is a programming language gaining some popularity in the first decade of 21st century due to lack of certain important features in Java. Some thing that these features invoke duck-typing, some like closures, but in fact the killer features is gems - standard packaging system for all Ruby libraries and frameworks.

Tim Boudreau on walking in circles

• 1999 - Make everything an EJB!....2002: "The best way to win the J2EE game is not to play" (Bruce Tate - Better, Faster, Lighter Java)
• 1980's - CASE tools generate giant wads of code for you; 1990's gee when there's a bug in my unreadable generated code, how do I fix it; 2006 or so...Ruby on Rails generates giant wads of code for you...
• 1990's - RMI, other "object with one foot on each side of the wire" strategies - network-based objects; 2000's - gee, you have no idea what call sequence will block on network I/O - objects with one foot on each side of the wire are a horrible idea - let's do SOA instead (which is just procedural programming over sockets).

-- Tim Boudreau

Andreas Stefik's addition

Just chiming in here. I'll admit that when I read this I laughed heartily I couldn't agree more!

The ruby on rails folks are obsessive compulsive about how awesome and "easy" rails is (e.g., a blog in five minutes), I suspect because it generates giant wads of code for you, which they somehow assume never needs to modified, or possibly that modifying it is "easy" or --- I don't know, something. Whenever I use it, though, I think to myself, "crap, now how do I debug these giant wads of generated unreadable code." I swear, every time I touch rails, I spend 90% of my time twiddling around with silly configuration and generation issues (or updating to version 2.20001, which seemingly changed the way you interact with your generated code from 2.20000) and the rest on actually doing something useful. And keep in mind, I have a phd, write compilers in my spare time, and have done a "reasonable" amount of web programming for various projects, so this isn't exactly my first day.

Anyway, that's my two cents, for what it is worth (if anything).

-- Andreas Stefik

Does Ruby show signs of Good Technology? I guess its time to market is excellent (blog in five minutes). The coolness is also there (or at least used to be few years ago). As far as I know the total cost of ownership is not that low as one is used to. But it takes time to find out what TCO for some technology is. But maybe people are realizing that now. Which may also be the reason why ruby is not seen as cool as it used to be. At least that is my observation: the buzz has now switched elsewhere (for example to parallelism which is not ruby's strongest point either).

--JaroslavTulach 05:30, 28 January 2010 (UTC)