On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 06:43:49AM +0900, Francis Cianfrocca wrote:
>  On 8/17/06, Charles O Nutter <headius@[...].com> wrote:
>  > I think there's a short answer that would please almost everyone: Ruby 
>  makes
>  >development cheaper, more fun, and more compelling than it has been since
>  >the late 90s.
>  
>  As interesting as your whole argument sounds, it's light on specific
>  business drivers. Enterprise IT is in the middle of a secular
>  transformation that will fundamentally change the playing field for
>  traditional vendors. You've correctly perceived that an explosion in
>  development productivity is under way. At the moment it's being spent
>  in an orgy of wheel-reinventing that Java (through the miracle of
>  well-focused corporate sponsorship) managed to largely avoid. But
>  along with the miracle of corporate sponsorship came the horror of...
>  Java itself, and there is an argument to be made that it couldn't have
>  turned out any other way.

I'm inclined to agree, re: Java.


>  
>  The right model for Ruby advocacy may not be Java but rather Python
>  (or Linux). If so, then success will come from organic growth and
>  slow, steady success, largely in projects far from the enterprise
>  mainstream (which these days is all bogged down thinking about
>  governance models for SOA- talk about expending cycles that don't
>  deliver business value!)

I'm inclined to agree here, as well -- most thoroughly.  I'd rather see
that sort of organic growth, in part because it would likely ensure that
the potential for disillusionment when the realities of the language are
separated from the marketing is minimized.  I think that Perl could be
added to the list of examples of the "right" model (it has had strong
successes, after all, and is still used widely and more so every year),
and that Logo should likely be listed amongst the examples of "wrong"
ways to do it (it's a victim of its own success as an "educational"
language: everyone thinks of it as a toy for children, while at least
one implementation of it is an easier-to-learn, truly powerful Lisp
dialect, and hype is what killed it).

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
This sig for rent:  a Signify v1.14 production from http://www.debian.org/