On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 1:47 PM, Joel VanderWerf <vjoel / path.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Christopher Dicely wrote:
>  > On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 7:20 AM, estherschindler <esther / bitranch.com> wrote:
>
> >>  http://www.cio.com/article/191000
>  >
>  > I'll use language a little less colorful than Zed himself might use in talking
>  > about MRI, Rails, and the Ruby Community outside of the pages of CIO,
>  > and say the article has some problems.
>
>  I'm a bit surprised he didn't take the easy shots at ruby: not suitable
>  for hard real time, for device drivers, for SMP, for embedding multiple
>  interpreters in a process, for very low memory situations. Most IT
>  managers won't know these things unless you tell them, no matter how
>  obvious they are to programmers.
>
>  Anyway, he seems to know about web and java gui, but not much about some
>  of the other topics he mentions. "Large data crunching"? What about Ara
>  Howard's work at NOAA? "Image manipulation"? Ditto. He briefly appears
>  to discount Event Machine without naming it or giving specifics about
>  why it's not suitable for "server protocols" (if he has a reason, I'd
>  like to know it!). I've found ruby extremely useful (with a bit of C
>  code compiled on the fly) for simulations that involve "heavy math or
>  computation" and for DSLs to specify and manage those simulations.

I agree he skipped over some things (both bad and good), but I think
his general point was that Ruby in a web production environment can be
a feisty animal (he mentioned math, but only briefly, and was clearly
unaware of some number-crunching that people have done).  But, just
like with any language, I suppose you need good programmers to have
good programs.  The only difference that I personally see is how easy
a particular language can allow someone to write bad code, and I think
that's what he was trying to get at.

Todd