Zio Bob su Ruby

Chi segue il blog di Zio Bob e quello di Ron Jeffries avrà di certo notato come quando questi due BIG incollano del codice nei loro post, il linguaggio di questi frammenti di codice è spesso Ruby.

In questo post Robert Martin dice la sua sul futuro di Ruby e RoR, e soprattutto su quale debba essere attualmente la collocazione di questo linguaggio nel mondo degli applicativi Web.

Cito alcuni dei passaggi più significativi (grassetti miei):

It is not time for Progressive Insurance to change over their whole on-line insurance system to Rails. It is not time for Amazon to leap whole-hog into Ruby. Ebay? No. Dot-Photo? No. It’s not time. Not yet.

On the other hand you have to consider that developing applications in Rails is proving to be startlingly more efficient than developing apps in Java or .NET. I don’t know the factor, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it is 2X to 5X less expensive for many applications. The development costs involved could far outweigh the cost of the extra servers needed because of Ruby’s less than stellar speed. Therefore even very large eterprisey companies (like big insurance companies) should be taking a very hard and long look at Rails, and conducting some intial experiements.

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I expect that the problems of speed and scaling are going to be solved, and solved quickly; and even the real big “Enterprisey” applications will soon be quite approriate for Ruby.
And remember, the really big “enterprisey” applications do not represent the majority of web applications. Indeed, they don’t even come close. So the other 95% of all web applications probably could, and should, be done in Ruby now.