NO, ruby is not ready for the enterprise. It’s not bloated enough. The conferences don’t cost thousands of dollars. It’s not full of joyless code zombies. Ruby is a hacker language. Like in the movie Hackers, they’re punk kids that steal credit card numbers, smoke pot and hang out at loud house parties all night. It’s free and open source, which Bob Metcalfe correctly identified as communism.
(Poor sarcasm aside: I don’t want ruby to be an enterprisey language, and neither does its creator).
via email to ruby.mn by Kyle Drake, Wed, 21 May 2008 16:13:57 -0700
Despite what Kyle says, eventually something like RoR will replace the bloated POS which is the Java development environment; there are too many code monkeys who hate working on it, people in big shops are tired of working in non-agile ways; and, if the infinite number of monkeys on a infinite number of typewriters can produce Shakespeare, then eventually — just like everything else — Java will implode under its own weight.
Java as it’s currently done is a mess. However, I could easily envision a JVM-based technology which makes it into the enterprise market instead of Ruby on Rails, particularly if it remained largely backwards compatible.
Both Groovy/Grails and JRuby/Rails are digging at this spot, but I’m not sure either of them have the market locked yet. It’ll be interesting to see what happens moving forward.