Comments on: Report from OSCON2006: The Ruby Conspiracy

By: Daniel Young

Daniel Young — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 09:50:38 +0000

Howdy Greg,
I’m very interested in Haskell, having done loads of it at uni, but I think that’s just a dream
I agree with much of what you’ve said, having evaluated RoR and come up with too many issues (unicode being the showstopper at the time, although perhaps it isn’t now), and am about to embark on a new enterprise app using JEE5, JBoss and JBoss Seam.
However, I do think the Prepared Statement issue is a red herring. Oracle has a CURSOR_SHARING setting which may help if you set it to “force”, and although you say Java has had PrepStats for years (which is true), earlier JDBC drivers (pre 1.4 I think?) didn’t do prepared statement caching, so you only really got benefit if you kept your PreparedStatement objects open and rolled-yr-own PS cache. This particular issue is one that will be easily fixed in the RoR world (unlike unicode).
Thanks for being “brave” enough to get flamed down by those who buy into all the hype just to be cool.
Disclaimer: I probably would recommend RoR for mickey mouse web apps, but they aren’t the kind of apps I’m interested in writing.

By: RUKidding

RUKidding — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 05:58:52 +0000

Um, maybe it’s me, but using the terms “huge support economy building around RoR” and “with it lots of vested interests in keeping the hype machine well fed” is sort of funny given the overlarge support economy built around Java (not to mention that it still continues to be overhyped as the only tool for all problems). The corker is “so hype is really the only lasting competitive advantage” applies to Java more than any other single technology I can think of.
For what it’s worth, EJB still sucks for the problems that RoR, Django, et al., are suited for because it’s too damned bulky (and yes, I’ve worked with Java for a *very* long time). Funnier still is that EJB1/2/3 are not backward-compatible so you get to rewrite your code again and again.
I made the observation to a colleague the other day that I’m sure that Java has a certain set of problems that it’s appropriate for but apparently the work I do with enterprise systems with web front ends is not among that set of problems. Wanna know a dirty secret? Java is one of the primary reasons that jobs are outsourced to the Far East and Eastern Europe. They have plenty of developers skilled in those technologies and they’ll work for a remarkably lower wage (not to mention the tax benefits for the company that is outsourcing work which is the real reason they do so).
YMMV…..
BTW, for those who know nothing of Rails there are ways to change the primary key from ‘id’ to something else. Of course, one would have to RTFM to know that………

By: J Fister

J Fister — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 13:03:22 +0000

>> But rails would like to have your 40,000 table schema all run off of a frikkin _ID_ column per table.

40,000 tables? How many organizations have a schema with 40K tables???
That's exactly why Rails is so popular. It doesn't cater to the 0.01% out there that MUST use something else. If you're in the 99.99% that don't have 40,000 tables in your schema, then Ruby/Rails is for you. Got 40,000+ tables? Then I'm afraid you and the other members of the 0.01% will have to continue coding in Java.

By: Erik

Erik — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 07:45:04 +0000

What really bothers me about this post is not the bashing of Ruby or of Rails. That’s commonplace and if you’re going to complain instead of moving on or trying to help fix the problems, then that’s your problem. Congratulations on your 15 minutes of fame.
What’s most disturbing is that you blame Tim O’Reilly for the hype on RoR. The Rails meme had reached meteoric scale way before O’Reilly posted to the Radar about the growth of Ruby book sales. And that’s not even hype, that’s just reporting the facts of the sales and trying to interpret them.
37Signals just worked the market correctly and got the meme going themselves. Do they stand to gain from RoR being hyped? Only through notoriety because Rails is open source. Yeah, they sell books too, but they’re much happier with their self-published book than their books through publishers.
Your post is so full of assumptions and leaps that the legitimacy you do have is crushed under the weight of them all. Write this post again and focus your arguments.

By: Ben George

Ben George — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 22:50:48 +0000

Lee, I agree that Python's block formatting makes it very readable compared to most languages (I never thought I would approve of whitespace significance in a language but it actually works well IMHO).

To me, Python's core APIs seem a bit confusing though. Why len(str) instead of str.len()? Why separator.split( target ) instead of target.split( separator )? I get confused about the use of dict() and tuple/list distinctions. The % syntax string interpolation seems archaic (yes I know there is the template module) and harder than Perl or Ruby's "$foo" and "#{foo}". Not major issues and I'm sure I'd get used to all this if I programmed in Python more regularly.

Personally I really like Ruby's similarity to Perl (but then, I'm a Perl fan). Tightly integrated regex support is a major plus as far as I am concerned.

On a side note, I came across a Perl module to allow Python code within Perl, and also a Perl hacker who'd overridden some Perl internals to allow Ruby style message passing. So you could write things like "2.times { block; }" and "2.plus(2)" in Perl.

By: Lee Francis

Lee Francis — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 17:58:25 +0000

A few years ago I decided to seriously learn another language. The choice was between Perl, Python and Ruby. I had always liked the charm of Perl, but the syntax was just too much. I had tried Python before, but was struggling with "whitespace issues". After looking a bit at Ruby I decided to give Python another go and haven't looked back since. I guess I just didn't like the Ruby syntax (too much borrowed from Perl).

I really have no idea why Ruby is getting all this attention. I can't help being just a bit dissapointed and I can't remember Python ever getting the same amount of attention as Ruby is getting now - and it's been around for alot longer. I doubt there is anything you can do in Ruby that Python can't do just as well.

Is Ruby so much better? Surly a language should be expected to be used for more than just web development, because let's face it - most people who learn Ruby today use it with Rails.

No, if you're interested in writing and READING code then Python is a safe bet. I am 99% sure I can read any Python code without much effort because of the mandatory whitespace in the code. It took a bit of getting used to, but now I feel right at home. I don't think you can say the same thing about Perl or Ruby.

By: Ben George

Ben George — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 10:22:05 +0000

LoL, great post.
Josh: “It can do the same amount of work in fewer lines of code, which means ‘tada!’ easier to maintain”
False. Terser program code can be harder to maintain. (see most perl scripts)
Coda Hale: “share-nothing architecture”
Or if the glass is half-empty, you might call it a “recompute everything on every single request architecture”
“ActiveRecord/memcached plugin…”
Oooh that’s great. Instead of putting the result of my expensive computation in something so primitive as say my computer’s memory, I’ll open up a network socket and send it across the network to a non-distributed single point of failure using a primitive and feature-poor “caching” API which does very little that a cache API should do leaving it all up to the client library to write its own stuff.
memcached is trumpetted as the knight in shining armour that saves PHP, Ruby etc in the performance domain. Even the crappiest Java cacheing solution is orders of magnitude faster. Very high traffic websites live or die based on one thing: cacheing. In Java app servers, cacheing is trivial. Drop in your chosen jar, set some properties (do you want distributed cacheing etc) and that’s it.
Bob Aman: “If I need performance, I use C.”
Don’t you mean if you need manual memory management, buffer-overflow security nightmares and lovely platform specific code?
I love Ruby,Python et al. As Greg discovered though, using them in real world high traffic sites can be painful disappointment when compared to such dull outmoded technology as Java.
It will be great when JDK 6 is production quality and we can script more closely within the VM. Switched on Java developers have been using beanshell, Rhino, groovy and so on for lightweight programming against arbitray Java libraries in the VM for years.
Everybody will benefit if Ruby, Python etc run well on the Java VM. For me, the VM was always the coolest thing about Java, the JDK itself being pretty dire in places.
The ultimate high performance web app would then use a Hibernate mapped domain model, with Java’s proven stable JDBC drivers, solid threaded servlet/JSP request processing, and the top layer of framework code and scriptlets written in Ruby.
Rails would then assume its true significance: Just Another Web Framework. Nothing more, nothing less.

By: Theo

Theo — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 12:45:52 +0000

Thanks for this article. I’m not actively against Ruby, but after I had started learning Ruby, I realised that Python, while syntactically slightly less compact than Ruby, has a far larger application spectrum behind it and is definitely much more mature. I too was a bit blinded by the Ruby hype, but it is no different to the PHP hype of a few years ago, and I prefer to not have to think too much about how much of a mess so many things have been with PHP.
So I switched to Python as my Perl ersatz for small web applications and scripting tasks.
As for comparing statically typed Java to dynamically typed scripting languages, well, it is as you say exactly those statically typed objects that enable powerful tools like Eclipse. Java is absolute overkill for small applications, but its maturity and huge support industry makes it, along with .Net really the only tool for large critical applications.

By: Baglan

Baglan — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 02:48:26 +0000

Saying that Rails is no good is not very different an attitude from preaching the Rails use. It is just a tool and has it’s advantages and disadvantages as any other.
Java is great but so is PHP; Oracle is magnificiet and MySQL is terrific; RoR is miraculous and Django is super-duper; thing is, they coexist.
And they all advance the technology.

By: amartano

amartano — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 09:43:17 +0000

Fair points! Personaly, I use Ruby because I like Ruby. It suits my purposes and I enjoy it’s style and flexibility. It’s not a silver bullet.
If you don’t like it, don’t use it. If you are using it because somebody told you to, cause it’s the best thing, and it doesn’t live up to it… switch? If you invested a lot of time into it without doing your own research and testing and are feeling let down… Who is to blame?
And if you did your own, found it lacking and moved on, and are annoyed that others find it useful and are touting it’s features… Why do you care? Of course the Hype and Propoganda are intended to generate interest and therefor a market, profit. Isn’t that the whole point?