Monday, October 6, 2008

I have seen the Future and its name is Ruby

Well, I haven't seen the future, but this guy has... I defer to Future Man for an update on the current state of the language:



ps. Be sure to see the outtake (?) at the end.

3 comments:

Jason Kilgrow said...

Ok. I'm not a big ruby fan to begin with. I only got 2:30 into the video and it lost me. Ugh.

So, the rest of this comment is, of course, IMO. And anyone is absolutely free to disagree with me. I encourage it!

1. I've had...issues...with Ruby. I still can't get the Mysql gem to compile correctly on a few of my test machines (RHEL boxes).
2. Ruby: good for scripting. Good for CRUD apps. Enterprise solution? Really?
3. Nice idea. Do we really need yet another scripting language?

I DO like the idea of DOI in a scripting language. If I can ever get some real scripts to work, I *may* adopt ruby over perl. But, as a replacement for my webapps? Nah...just isn't going to happen anytime soon.

IMO, ruby is a nice language for small scale, simple projects. But I don't think it was ever meant to scale to an enterprise level.

Michael Easter said...

Thanks for the note, Jason.

First, I should note that I don't know Ruby or RoR.

However, I'm a big fan of Python and Groovy, which are kindred spirits to Ruby (especially Python).

Python is used by major players including Google and YouTube. I don't see why they couldn't have used Ruby in its stead.

So, I don't see why Ruby, especially jRuby, couldn't be used for the enterprise. I'm not so sure that RoR can handle massive scale, but I'll leave that for others to debate.

ps. "Scripting language" doesn't do justice to these languages. They are incredibly powerful.

Michael Easter said...

@ readers. _I_ think the vid is great, but even if you don't, check out the last 12 seconds (for a laugh).