But then… Ruby borrowed from Perl, Smalltalk
and Python, and looks nothing like C, and
one could say that Ruby is *already*
successful in its own way powering a lot
of the web2.0 startups.
And both Sun and Microsoft now have
implementations of Ruby.

So in the end, I guess it all depends on what
you mean by the word *success*.

Ubiquitous Ruby applications in Fortune 500
companies, perhaps ?

Some nice reading, and food for thought,
so thanks for the article.

UG

Ruby doesn't "need" a particular market to be successful.

Aside: Mr. McGovern's writing – a conglomeration of factual, logical, rhetorical and grammar errors – is some of the poorest seen in these parts in awhile. It _hurts_ to read that writing!-)

Yes, Javascript has more power to be useful within the enterprise than Ruby does. You should talk about this aspect more.

See latest posting on my reason for bashing books. It is all about declarative living and increasing transparency. You will learn even more facts (different from perspective) on this particular aspect of book authoring.

Wasn’t even thinking about the difficulty in language switching. You should talk about the characteristics of when/why enterprises are willing to make a switch.

As far as which definition of enterprise software, my general thinking tends to lean towards number 2.

It’s worth separating out “enterprise software” into two camps:

There are actually 2 kinds of people in the world:

People who divide the world into 2 groups of people.
People who don’t.

Couldn’t resist! I think this is close to the center of the debate (or maybe just one of a few key epicenters?). I’ll be interested to see how long it takes for vendors to show up at the doors of large companies with systems implemented primarily on Ruby. I think step 1 will actually be in your second category, and will involve JRuby. I can see some of the larger vendors with JEE implementations bringing in the Ruby syntax for scripting and some types of customization.

Man did this powder keg explode.

A bit of controversy is always good for everyone. CIOs who haven’t heard of Ruby probably do now.

James McGovern has been very careful with what he’s saying. And he’s carefuly left out the logical conclusion so that people like us get to bite the bait. This is game theory at its best.

Chui

The point about the books is somehting I want to comment on though: Why in God's name should books on a language or Framework cover higher level aspects of writing software? Shouldn't books on architecture be about architecture by itself instead of architecture in a specific language or framework?

Have we yet to rise above the falsehood that a language is more important than experience and wisdom in software design? Ruby doesn't have any magic sauce for your architecture (aside from a few modules that implement some of the class GoF patterns), it just makes some of those low level details easier to handle. Those are the productivity gains that Ruby realizes, and I'm not sure why it's important that Ruby doesn't give you the silver bullet for the architecture.

Heed the wisdom of the Japanese automaker: Make better every piece you can.

A “mainstream” IDE/toolset wouldn’t hurt, either. Full integration into Eclipse would be a selling point. You and I know it’s rather less important in Ruby than it is for C#, say, but I can see how the corporate IT managers would feel happier if every developer’s PC were running the same editor…

So the adoption of Ruby is likely to be a stealth/guerilla/niche thing for some time yet. If it really is a major language of the future then the necessary critical mass will have to be achieved below the surface, prior to a sudden explosion into visibility. It might happen. I rather hope it will.

Hope I'm not suppose to play the Ruby zealot on this one because it
seems like a good evaluation of the present situation. We're not all
hot-house flowers over here and we certainly understand our current
position in the big-E enterprise. The larger Ruby (and dynamic
language community in general) understands the benefits of objective
criticism and debate and I hate to see you spreading disclaimers
throughout your posts for fear of attracting the troll-brigade.

But let me just suggest that negative opinion isn't what gets
people excited, it's the condescension. I think where we run into
problems is when McGovern puts on his authoritative end-all/know-all
Enterprise Architect hat instead of trying to have a conversation. For
instance, what was he on about wrt Ruby books?

While there are lots of books on Ruby, none of them are
good. Most are mediocre and deal with the simplistic aspects of
writing software

I mean, why not just leave that out?

We seem to have a reputation for being childish or overzealous
while this kind of stuff gets passed around as conventional wisdom. I
don't see how McGovern recent posts can be considered "Thought
Leadership", or any kind of leadership for that matter.