Ruby and the Opposite of Momentum

I think it's very unfair of him to be criticizing and writing off Rubinius. "Rubinius looked like the light and hope of the Rubyverse, but their team has been slashed..."

Just because it was financially responsible for Engine Yard to cut back from 6 to 2 fulltime developers does not mean that Rubinius is dead. Rubinius has as and always will be a community project.

Furthermore, the author states "But the problem is that [ruby is] essentially stagnant." Because of Rubinius, Ruby finally as a proper spec. This means we will see an "arms race" as he calls it, and it's because of Rubinius. PLUS, 4 implementations under active development (Rubinius, 1.9, MacRuby, JRuby) hardly seems stagnant to me.

Bottom line: this is FUD.

You know what really bothers me about ruby? It seems like it's the smaller companies who are behind it - like EngineYard and 37Signals. None of the heavyweights seem to be interested in Ruby.

This seems to me to be a bad thing for the long term prospects for the language. Big companies think long term, small companies tend to change their focus often. If I'm going to invest my time in a language, I want it to stick around for long.

I can't believe I spelled "except" "accept". I need to get some sleep.

Maybe it is FUD, but that is because I am experiencing Uncertainty, Doubt, and at least a little bit of Fear on the subject of what high-level dynamic language I am going to work with next. I certainly have carried a lot of water for the Ruby team, and I'm worried what I'm going to do with all my free time if I don't have a language to idolize! ;)

I don't want to have to write off Rubinius, and I have a lot of respect for Evan and the members of his team that I know. But can we be brutally honest for a second? The only independent Ruby implementation to have delivered goods, of any sort, is JRuby. I will trust Rubinius when it is publicly released. Until then, it's just another one of several projects claiming that Christmas will bring me a new, faster Ruby. And I've been hearing that same promise before, again and again.

And saying that the Ruby spec is somehow unbroken Ruby stasis? We damn well better have a spec! Ruby has been essentially unchanged for at least 2 years. Saying, "Well at least we have a spec now!" seems like the lowest possible bar for success.

P.S. MacRuby is fascinating, but let's see it on more than 1 of the Big Three before we start saying it's a serious competitor.

Ruby has had huge impact on the way I write software. Whatever programming language or tools I'll use tomorrow, it will be dynamic.

Without Ruby on Rails there would have been no Groovy on Grails web application framework. But rubyist keep pushing limits, creating new kinds of database orm libraries like sequel and new web frameworks like sinatra.

Sinatra makes me write web applications that looks like haiku:

  require 'rubygems'
  require 'sinatra'

  get '/' do
     "This is a web application!"
  end

Sequel makes me write SQL queries that don't look like SQL:

  dataset = DB[:managers].where(:salary =>   5000..10000).order(:name, :department)

And haml makes html tagging look pretty:

  %h1 Markup
   %p
     .my_id Look ma, no end tags!

When you first got a taste for this style of programming, there's no going back. I don't now if I'll be coding Ruby, JRuby, JavaScript, Scala or Groovy tomorrow, but it will be done Ruby style.