Re: Meeting agenda robot

----- "Bruce Perens" <bruce(at)perens(dot)com> wrote:

> http://antoniocangiano.com/2007/12/03/the-great-ruby-shootout/

It depends on what you are doing. One thing is certain, the JavaVM can run Ruby code competitively and YARV cannot do the reverse.

> The main reason I'd not tremendously recommend building new projects in
> Java is efficient utilization of the programmer, and of the subsequent
> programmers who will have to maintain the project. Performance will not
> be the critical factor for this project.
>
> For best readability by subsequent maintainers, either Python or Ruby
> should be recommended. The disciplined can write elegant software in any
> language, but some languages are better at guiding the programmer to do
> so than others.

Here, your argument falls flat. My whole point is that the Java VM can execute Ruby code, so you can code in Ruby (or Haskell for that matter) if that suits your fancy. What you cannot do in a Ruby environment is invoke Ruby methods (or Java or Haskell or whatever) from PHP code... which you can do in Java via Quercus. The sheer scale of the Java based toolsets is the point. Neither Ruby nor Python has something that is vaguely a challenger to Eclipse. Its closest competitor is NetBeans, which is still written in Java.

Real time memory profiling, multi-processor clustering (terracotta), caching, message queues and a whole host of other technologies are all quite mature on the Java VM while they are in the infancy or don't exist at all for Python and Ruby.

I have solved many commercial contracts using the Java system and I frankly find it frustrating to have offers of assistance shot down because of ill-informed language bigotry. A short list of systems we've recently built out:

http://everestresearchinstitute.com
http://checkmark.heart.org
http://listingpr.com
http://radiusdp.com

There are others (some of a more significant scale) that I cannot discuss for contractual reasons. I would be curious to see some examples from those of you who are working in Ruby and Python.

--
Ean Schuessler, CTO Brainfood.com
ean(at)brainfood(dot)com - http://www.brainfood.com - 214-720-0700 x 315