On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 12:14 PM, Dave Bass <davebass / musician.org> wrote:
> Mike Stephens wrote:
>> If you supply services to corporates, what sort of case can you make for
>> using Ruby rather than Java, which is in use everywhere?
>
> Not a very good case: Java rules.
It is indeed the ignorance that rules today. This ignorance however is
nothing a single person has to be ashamed of. It is imposed by
ridiculously short decision times, extreme budget pressure and an
overall stressful environment.
I am not capable of quoting any studies on this and would welcome any
pointers. It is however quite obvious (my favourite prove method ;),
that the pressure which exists in our professional lives discourages
reflexion, deep understanding of what we are doing and innovative
decisions. It is my believe that the winning business model will be
one that breaks this vicious circle.

My personal experience is that when I am talking to a decision taker
about Ruby and she asks me why, my first sentence is already
completely misunderstood - I am well aware of my responsibility in
this kind of misunderstanding. But I never get a chance to discuss
matters during say an hour. The cherry on top of the cream was one
internal encounter with the decision maker, where I suggested to stop
developpement in Java and start with Ruby using JRuby for an easy
transition. This was considered to much risk taking and too much time
consuming (sic). After presenting my case (1800s) the aforementioned
response was made in less than 300s. Immediately after that they
stalled the project for two months (yes that is 5184000s, you got that
right) in which they discussed a migration from Java to C#(1). I have
not stayed along to experience the outcome of this.... one has only
one stomach you know :(
>
> For me, Ruby was an upgrade from Perl, which I've used for everything
> from CGI scripts to the sort of number crunching one would normally
> associate with C. Development of Perl 6 seems lost in the wilderness so
> I jumped to Ruby.
Exactly my reason, thank you Perl6 team ;).
> I don't regret it, but I still use Perl 5 where
> appropriate. And PHP. Even a little JavaScript. Horses for courses.
Perl used in a sober way can be very beautiful.

Cheers
Robert

(1) And that for one reason, the new maintainer of the package
thaught, correctly or incorrectly that the GUI would be sexier with
.NET.

-- 
Il computer non una macchina intelligente che aiuta le persone
stupide, anzi, una macchina stupida che funziona solo nelle mani
delle persone intelligenti.
Computers are not smart to help stupid people, rather they are stupid
and will work only if taken care of by smart people.

Umberto Eco