In Qcon London 2008 conference , I attended a panel discussion for what type of projects should we use rails. As one of the audience mentioned during the discussion, that all the panel members were pro-ruby :) It is not a big deal, but I just thought it was funny. I have lot of respect for all those panel members.
The discussion for some reason was totally off topic. Probably the discussion about what types of project can be implemented using rails happened like 5% of time. Most of the discussion was about why nobody from ruby community was worried about ruby running so slow in Windows. Someone from audience mentioned if Ruby community wants ruby to become mainstream and accepted as a language by all enterprises, it should run faster in Windows. Panel members said that they do not really care that much about ruby getting accepted in Enterprises. They told that they are doing it because Ruby as a language makes easy for them to solve the problems.
I totally accept that. If I find a language that is helping me to solve a problem more eloquently, than I will use that language. I do not care whether that language will be accepted by all big enterprises or not. If there is someone smart in those enterprises, than s/he will decide what language is good for solving their particular problem.
But one question enterprises will be asking, "who is responsible for RUBY ?" so that they can blame them when something goes wrong.
4 comments:
What exactly do you mean by "responsible" and are you talking about the language or a particular ruby interpreter (there are many)?
Hi Aslak:
I meant who is responsible for ruby language and whole ecosystem around it. For example , enterprises are comfortable using Java and C# as these languages are backed by Sun and Microsoft. I am not saying it is necessarily a good thing to have some big corporation backing up ruby platform. I am just telling enterprises won't be that comfortable to use a language which is not backed by some big corporation. We won't be seeing some welfare system written in ruby in near future. My post is just a question I had. I wanted to now what others think about this. Do we have to really be even worried about it? This weekend I spend some time thinking about it. I will post my thoughts in my next blog.
Let me know what you think.
Matz is responsible for the language. I guess you could call him the benevolant dicatator of the language.
The various interpreter implementors are collaborating on a language specification based on RSpec.
There are already big corps using Linux, Python and other Open Source products that don't have a big "sueable" company behind it. It's not a problem as long as companies can buy support. Support doesn't have to come from the same place as the language or a particular interpreter, and I expect there will be several companies offering support.
Is this a typo?
"The various interpreter implementors are collaborating on a language specification based on RSpec."
Yah I think support is a good point that you made. Lets see what happens.
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