On 8/17/06, Charles O Nutter <headius / 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.

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!)

The payoff from the productivity explosion will come to enterprise
environments in time. One thing I'm confident about, however, is that
it won't necessarily accrue to the benefit of traditional technology
vendors. If I'm right, then trying to find a big corporate backer for
Ruby among today's big players may be counterproductive as well as
hard to do.