Otaku, Cedric‘s weblog: Why Ruby on Rails won‘t become mainstream

Otaku, Cedric‘s weblog
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April 06, 2006
Why Ruby on Rails won‘t become mainstream

You won‘t be reading any Ruby on Rails bashing in this blog post for a simple reason:  I love Ruby and I love Ruby on Rails.
Rails is a fantastic framework built on a wonderful language that appealed to me the very first day I started to study it.  I think David did a fantastic job in two areas:
Coming up with innovative ideas that take Web programming to a new level. Leveraging the strength of Ruby to achieve his goal.
To tell the truth, the Pick Axe and Agile Web Development with Rails books are the best two technical books I have read these past years.  I read quite a few technical books, but none has caught my interest and made me look forward to resuming my reading more than these two books.  And to top it all, features such as Headless Applications, as illustrated in thisblog post by Mike Clark, clearly show how powerful Rails is.
There is no denying that Ruby on Rails is turning the Web programming world on its head.
Now that this introduction is out of the way, I‘d like to take some time to explain why, in spite of all its qualities, Ruby on Rails will never become mainstream.
As you probably guessed, my conviction doesn‘t come from technical grounds.
The truth is that there are a lot of forces involved in making a Web framework successful, but before I dive into those, allow me to tell a little side story.
Have you ever come across Smalltalk or Lisp programmers?  You know, these people who, no matter what you tell them, will always respond that "Smalltalk did that twenty years ago" or that "Nothing has been invented since Lisp".  They listen to you patiently with an amused light in their eyes and when you‘re done talking, they will just shrug away your points and kindly recommend that you read up on a thirty-year old technology that was the last thing they ever learned and that has been dictating every single technical judgment they have offered since then.
I believe that in ten years from now, people will look back at Ruby on Rails and will have the same reaction.  I‘m not sure what Web frameworks we will have by then, but I‘m quite convinced that a lot of the current Ruby on Rails fanatics will have the same kind of attitude:  "That‘s nice, but Ruby on Rails already did this ten years ago, and better".
Interestingly, they might even be right.  But by then, it won‘t matter because despite its technical excellence, Ruby on Rails will still be a niche technology that only experts know about.
So why do I think that Ruby on Rails will never cross the chasm?
First of all, Ruby.
Again, and at the risk of repeating myself:  I love Ruby.  I truly do.  It‘s one of the few languages that I have studied these past years that made me go "Yeah!" whenever I read about a feature I didn‘t know of yet.  I find its syntax and concepts extremely elegant and powerful at the same time.  I don‘t like everything about it, of course, but Ruby is by far the number two language in my toolbox behind Java, with number three far, far behind.  But it‘s a complex language that contains a lot of advanced idioms which will be very hard for PHP and Visual Basic programmers to absorb.
Admittedly, PHP and Visual Basic are cheap targets (we‘re talking about languages that don‘t even have name spaces!), but like it or not, they are the Web standard.  Anyone who wants to succeed in the Web arena must have a compelling story to tell to these programmers, something that will convince them to switch to Rails on technical grounds but that will also be an easy sell to their management.  Rails can‘t succeed without these two conditions, and I am predicting that Ruby -- and Ruby on Rails -- will always remain a tough sell to any organization that contains more than ten people.
Ruby on Rails itself.
Ruby on Rails is just too advanced.  I‘m serious.  It has an incredible amount of slick features involving a lot of magic (both Ruby-related and invented by David himself).  For talented developers, these features are a dream come true...  autowiring of the MVC, scaffolding, defaults over configuration, unit tests (even integration tests now, nice!), you name it.  David hit every single pain point that Web developers (regular developers even) have been facing these past years.  Ruby on Rails in itself is a great example of how to nicely package what we have learned about software development these past five years.
But it‘s still a very wide gap for corporate developers to cross.  Sometimes, too much magic is too much magic, and it can definitely be the case that the flow of code is too direct or too clever to be understandable by regular developers.  Developers were able to do the jump from imperative to object-oriented programming, but it was a hard fight.  I don‘t believe the Web world will ever be ready to embrace the Rails cleverness.
Still no credible IDE.
All fanatics of dynamic languages are quick to point that they don‘t need an IDE to use Ruby, Python, Groovy or other.  And they will quickly add that if you need one, you‘re probably not being rubyic or pythonic enough and that you should probably switch back to your old language and leave the grown ups alone.
This is nonsense.  Ignore these people, they don‘t understand how the real world works and how developers think, and they are one of the reasons why so many great technologies never make it to the mainstream.  Don‘t ever be ashamed to need an IDE or to ask for one.  Of course, there are bad ways to use an IDE (e.g. you want code generated for you) but if you are interested in Ruby on Rails, chances are that you are a decent developer and you know how to leverage an IDE to make you more productive than when using emacs.  Code completion or navigation, debugging, refactoring, project management, source control integration, etc...  there are too many features to list that make you more productive if you use a tool that enables them.
This is 2006, not 1996.  The programs we are writing and the problems we are solving every day are orders of magnitude harder than back then, and our tools need to keep up with that need.  Emacs is a fine text editor, but it‘s no longer adequate for modern development.
Fanaticism.
Regular readers of my blog know how strongly I feel on this topic.  There are exceptions, of course, but the attitude of Ruby on Rails users toward Ruby skeptics or critics has been less than kind.  This is a crowd convinced that it has found the ultimate answer to everything, and they are not afraid to let you know.  I only have a simple advice for these people:  you might be right, but just be humble.  It never hurts.
Crowd of a single mind.
If you want to write a Web application in Ruby, there is only one solution.  Only one.  Ruby on Rails.
Ruby on Rails has pretty much nuked the field of Web development in Ruby, and I wonder if it‘s such a good thing.  For all the flak that Java receives because you can count at least a dozen different Web frameworks, there is something to be said about plurality and the constant chase for something better and different.  Each framework that comes out builds on the strengths of its ancestors while discarding the errors (and committing a few mistakes of its own, of course). The field advances a little bit every time while bowing down to the timeless laws of natural selection.
I am worried that Ruby on Rails will do to the Ruby world what JUnit did to Java:  a great tool when it came out but which condemned its community to an ice age where no innovation or competition appeared for years.  Whatever the fate of Ruby, I hope its fans will keep an open mind and will constantly challenge the Rails way, for the simple reason that it‘s always healthy to question what‘s in place, no matter how good it looks.
Enterprise capabilities and scalability unclear.
This is an argument that the Rails crowd doesn‘t take well, and they are quick to point out BaseCamp and other products.  The problem is that by now, there should be other obvious success Rails stories, and not just ones developed by the Rails Society.  Of course, it‘s a chicken and egg problem:  a lot of companies evaluate Ruby on Rails but will only take the jump if they can find evidence that other companies have done that before them.  And for now, the evidence is scarce at best.
Granted, Java took a while to rise to the enterprise challenge as well, and it did so despite tremendous initial handicaps such as poor performances and questionable specifications.  I contend that until Rails goes through its own EJB2 debacle, it won‘t be seen as enterprise ready.
Lack of support from Internet Providers.
What‘s the big deal with this, you ask?  After all, Java ishardly supported by Internet Providers as well.  The big difference is that Java on the server is targeted at the enterprise.  Anyone who wants to run a Java EE application will most likely host their own servers.
Ruby on Rails is targeting a different population:  the "Web sites in-between", these sites that are not massively scalable but still have more than a few visits per day.  A lot of these people use external hosting, and they won‘t go very far if Rails is not offered natively and pre-installed for them.  PHP is a no-brainer for them, because it‘s installed virtually on 99% of Internet Providers.
Of course, a little bit of .htaccess magic will allow you to run your own Rails application, whether your provider supports it or not, and assuming that they give you that amount of privileges and that you don‘t need to scale too high, but until Ruby on Rails achieves at least half of the PHP penetration, it will remain inaccessible to most of the population it needs to become mainstream.
Note that I didn‘t say anything about poor error reporting, weak internationalization support or Active Record, which are usually the areas where Ruby on Rails is the most criticized.  I‘m not worried about these because they are simply a symptom of Ruby on Rails‘ youth.  They will be fixed in time, and I don‘t think they will play a big role in Ruby in Rails‘ acceptance (or lack thereof).
So there you have it.  My prediction on Ruby on Rails in one, lengthy post.  I apologize for the size of this article, I usually try to keep my blog entries short and to the point.  I hope at least that I achieved the latter.
I‘ll conclude on a positive note:  I hope I‘m wrong.  I really, sincerely do.  For my next work, I want to have a choice between Java and Ruby, but right now, when in doubt, even I usually end up returning to Java for my personal projects for the reasons listed above.
And as you know, I love it when frameworks and languages compete for my business.  But right now, I see no competition.
Posted by cedric at April 6, 2006 07:42 AM
Comments
First, Thanks for this post and I‘d like to say: I do agree with almost all of your arguments.
But ;) not on the conclusions...
Well I‘m not a fortune teller ;)
> First of all, Ruby.
Ruby (advanced features) are complex but ruby leverage the learning curve. You can start by learning few tricks and then get better by the time... Back then when I learned Java it was more painfull :( (I started with Jtable in a swing applet, arg! bad memories!)
> Anyone who wants to succeed in the Web arena must (...) convince programmers
I think the blog video did just that ;)
> (...) also be an easy sell to their management.
Something that must be done and will be hard but the fact that many rails developpers are coming from j2ee and are well known architects will surely help...
take a look at gary‘s post http://www.jroller.com/page/dgeary?entry=tipping_rails
> Ruby on Rails itself.
Magic is good because it makes developpers more productive which is something your pointy haired boss will surely like ;)
> Still no credible IDE.
I‘m not a vi/emacs addict at all!
But you must have missed something call "radrails".
It‘s an amazing plugin who just won an eclipse award (http://www.radrails.org/blog/show/56)
Take a look at it ;)
> Fanaticism
I hope I‘m not like one of those lisp guys ;)
I agree that staying humble is the way to go since rails is not perfect either
> Crowd of a single mind.
There are other inovative web frameworks (http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/camping/)
But The fact that one of them is the reference is a breath of fresh air coming from J2ee (I think there are to many of them out there).
Also this didn‘t bothered the ASP developpers to have only one option during all the last past years...
> Enterprise capabilities and scalability unclear.
I found some amazing numbers about the shift to rails (http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/articles/2006/02/01/secrets-behind-ruby-on-rails-the-numbers)
400 000 Downloads
550 develppers / 50 countries
25000 Agile web dev with rails books sold
(http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/12/ruby_book_sales_surpass_python.html)
o‘reilly ruby books sales up to +1552% since last year
more than python book sales
About performances see the great post of Justin Gehtlan (http://blogs.relevancellc.com/articles/2005/04/04/some-numbers-at-last)
who wrote http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/bfljava/
The numbers are amazing too!
He just changed is blog look, the post is just one big block :(
> Lack of support from Internet Providers
Rails is young but I sure it will come at time goes by... you already have http://www.typhon.net/en/ if you‘re looking for one ;)
When I can choose between java and rails, I personnaly take rails because I don‘t want to use my spare time on configuring hibernate mapping files and making yet an other ant file ;)
Posted by:Benjamin Francisoud at April 6, 2006 01:27 AM
I think you make some good points Cedric but Rails is still young and, as you acknowledge, has a lot going for it. Call me optimistic but fast forward to 2008 and I reckon many of the obstacles you mention, whether perceived or real, will no longer exist.
Posted by:Keith Pitty at April 6, 2006 01:28 AM
Concerning Lack of support from Internet Providers, free Java hosting is impossible to find...
But that‘s what participate in the "Entreprisish" way of Java ;-)
Posted by: Julien Carnelos at April 6, 2006 01:40 AM
While I don‘t agree with every single point it is still an excellent post, thank you.
But at least with your "Crowd of a single mind" you are wrong. There is Nitro (http://www.nitrohq.com/) which is under active development and has been around about as long as RoR. It is not well known to the public right now but everyone who gets really serious about RoR will come across it sooner or later.
I don‘t know if it ever will gain such popularity and momentum as RoR but it is an alternative with its own pros and cons.
So I agree with you: There is only one well known and documented solution (RoR) but there certainly is another serious/well written one out there (there may be more I don‘t know of)
Posted by: at April 6, 2006 01:50 AM
Great blog, with many good points, and a great piece of rhetoric. I‘m currently trying to find the right term to describe your post: antiphrasis? Asteism? Apagogy? Pradox? Or maybe... Hyperchleuasme
Posted by: Gabriel at April 6, 2006 02:05 AM
"you might be right, but just be humble"
this is where Matz succeed, and DHH fails horribly.
counting down to a response post on www.loudthinking.com
Posted by:Ben at April 6, 2006 02:58 AM
> contains a lot of advanced idioms which will be very hard for PHP ... programmers to absorb
I can‘t speak for VB programmers but talking with people at phpLondon, quite a few of them are interested and/or working in ruby / rails. I think the interest is there and that there are just as many people coming to ruby from a php background as from a java background. The pain point may be different - i.e. people from a php background may be looking for a MORE structured approach. Countless php job adverts specify Java as a skill requirement - frequently this has nothing to do with actually using Java on the job but more to do with working with an OO/structured approach. Ruby may hit that sweet spot.
> Developers were able to do the jump from imperative to object-oriented programming, but it was a hard fight
Similarly it may be a hard fight to convince people of the benefits of using rails; that doesn‘t mean that it is a fight that can‘t be won.
> Crowd of a single mind
There was an interesting issue raised on the RoR podcast about this and risk - i.e. Your choice is between Java (low risk) and Ruby (high risk) as a language. However, once this has been selected, you then have to make choices on the framework / ORM / templating language etc. etc. In the Java world (and also in the php world) there are a plethora of options - leaving you exposed to some high risk choices. Ruby only really has rails, leaving only a low/no risk choice once you have selected the language.
> Enterprise capabilities ... unclear
This is a fair point (although not necessarily in terms of scalability). It is easy to shift unintentionally from the mindset that "RoR is better 90% of the time" to "RoR is better 100% of te time". It may turn out that the 10% of cases where RoR isn‘t better is what the enterprise really cares about.
Posted by: Roland at April 6, 2006 03:22 AM
I do wonder a little at how good Ruby would be when used by large teams as there can be so much magic going on and people extending classes all over the place that its sometimes a bit hard to know what really is going on - especially if you join a project 1 year after the development finished. Don‘t get me wrong - I love Ruby too - and love the power, its just maybe its too powerful :).
When large teams are involved - or projects which last many years- one of the most important things is how easy is it to understand what a piece of code does. When it comes to readability, sometimes more verbose code thats trivial to understand is way more useful than one or two lines of extreme-ninja cleverness with jedi mind tricks :)
We spend way more time in the real world reading code, written by someone else some time ago than churning out brand new stuff quickly; while Rails rocks for the latter I‘m not yet sure how good it is at the former.
But competition is great; I‘m hoping both Java and Ruby continue to improve and get better.
Posted by:James Strachan at April 6, 2006 03:32 AM
Nice article, only one thing: I‘m not sure why you think that in 10 years, there could be Smug-RoR-Weenies who will say "Ruby On Rails did that first". I‘d say, Java and other systems had many of the features before RoR, but RoR got them right by learning from their mistakes. So, unlike the Smug-{Smalltalk|Lisp}-Weenies, old Rubyists can talk about how they got things right...
Posted by:murphee at April 6, 2006 04:08 AM
It needs few million marketing dollars too. Marketing can do wonders to popularity as Microsoft will attest.
Posted by:Angsuman Chakraborty at April 6, 2006 04:13 AM
It needs few million marketing dollars too. Marketing can do wonders to popularity as Microsoft will attest.
Posted by:Angsuman Chakraborty at April 6, 2006 04:13 AM
You‘ll find an amazing count of Projects that are using RubyOnRails in the real world at http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RealWorldUsage Projects you might heard of are pennyarcade.com and alistapart.com . These aren‘t success stories? Come on!
Such a young project and so many people converting high volume sites to or are programming there start-ups with it, it‘s amazing. Sorry, but your research isn‘t as great as the blog and it‘s rethoric make you think it is at the first look!
Posted by: Jan Prill at April 6, 2006 05:06 AM
There is only one true way.
ASP.NET
Everyone else, confess your sins. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
Posted by:Lady Godiva at April 6, 2006 06:21 AM
While this is a good post, the real genius of it lies in the comments, which when taken as a whole, prove that rails fanboys are everything they‘re accused of being. A defensive, territorial, arrogant, and surprisingly narrow minded lot. A reciple for success if I‘ve ever seen one.
Posted by:Hani Suleiman at April 6, 2006 06:32 AM
While this is a good post, the real genius of it lies in the comments, which when taken as a whole, prove that rails fanboys are everything they‘re accused of being. A defensive, territorial, arrogant, and surprisingly narrow minded lot. A reciple for success if I‘ve ever seen one.
Posted by:Hani Suleiman at April 6, 2006 06:33 AM
The big turn-off for me is 1) DHH is too arrogant, and 2) Rubyists are not forthcoming enough about the weaknesses of Rails (yes, it actually has weaknesses omfg!). To get them to admit these things is like pulling teeth.
Basically the whole thing stinks to me of a guy with a God complex and his band of worshippers (sheep) who spend more time talking about greatness and less time time producing it.
Posted by: Sam at April 6, 2006 07:34 AM
Nice post, but I don‘t agree completely.
Anyone who thinks that String+Hibernate+WebWorks/Struts+J2EE is much easier to comprehend for an ordinary (corporate as you said) developer must be out of his mind.
What kind of features do you expect from an IDE when you work with dynamic languages like Ruby/Python/Perl?
Posted by: Kent at April 6, 2006 07:36 AM
Add WebObjects programmers to your Lisp and Smalltalk set. WebObjects and EOF have been doing what Rails does for 10 years also.
Posted by: at April 6, 2006 07:56 AM
I think you hit a lot right on the head, especially in "Ruby on Rails Itself."
Prior to my current job, I worked at large corporate finance companies. About 10% of the developers where "architects" that determined the tools and direction of the rest of the developers. Out of the remaining 90%, the vast majority did not have any business being developers. They Of course it‘s not. almost all only knew one language (Java), and some were trained in the field by places like Heald and ITT, which promised unfathomable wealth and rock star status.
In other words, those that truly loved the technology, loved to explore, loved to try new things, loved to code after work, were a distinct minority. Anyone like that ran into beurecracy or opposition from the majority.
You really need work in a large company like that to truly understand. The pay was good, the benefits (especially retirement) were excellent, and the hours even better. For a lot of people, this makes a great formula for complacency and a horrible formula for innovation and experimentation.
Sam says, "Anyone who thinks that String+Hibernate+WebWorks/Struts+J2EE is much easier to comprehend for an ordinary (corporate as you said) developer must be out of his mind." It‘s not that they‘re out of their mind. But when you‘ve been at a large, stable company for 5+ years working in Java, going home at 5:00 pm every night to be with the kids, most people like that and don‘t want it to change. J2EE has been very, very good to a lot of people. There‘s no incentive to keep up with the rest of the IT world because Architecture is still telling them to use Java/J2EE. And why is Architecture telling us to keep this environment? Because their recommendations have made the company invest literally millions in J2EE.
That, ultimately, is the hardest task. You have to convince a company with J2EE servers lined up and Websphere Application Developer at every workstation, and managers (often with no technical background and only interested in the output to make themselves look good) to abandon the known and use the unknown.
The IDE and scalability issues are important, but will be solved over time. Changing the mentality of entrenched people is a whole different issue.
Posted by:Shu Chow at April 6, 2006 08:06 AM
I think you hit a lot right on the head, especially in "Ruby on Rails Itself."
Prior to my current job, I worked at large corporate finance companies. About 10% of the developers where "architects" that determined the tools and direction of the rest of the developers. Out of the remaining 90%, the vast majority did not have any business being developers. They Of course it‘s not. almost all only knew one language (Java), and some were trained in the field by places like Heald and ITT, which promised unfathomable wealth and rock star status.
In other words, those that truly loved the technology, loved to explore, loved to try new things, loved to code after work, were a distinct minority. Anyone like that ran into beurecracy or opposition from the majority.
You really need work in a large company like that to truly understand. The pay was good, the benefits (especially retirement) were excellent, and the hours even better. For a lot of people, this makes a great formula for complacency and a horrible formula for innovation and experimentation.
Sam says, "Anyone who thinks that String+Hibernate+WebWorks/Struts+J2EE is much easier to comprehend for an ordinary (corporate as you said) developer must be out of his mind." It‘s not that they‘re out of their mind. But when you‘ve been at a large, stable company for 5+ years working in Java, going home at 5:00 pm every night to be with the kids, most people like that and don‘t want it to change. J2EE has been very, very good to a lot of people. There‘s no incentive to keep up with the rest of the IT world because Architecture is still telling them to use Java/J2EE. And why is Architecture telling us to keep this environment? Because their recommendations have made the company invest literally millions in J2EE.
That, ultimately, is the hardest task. You have to convince a company with J2EE servers lined up and Websphere Application Developer at every workstation, and managers (often with no technical background and only interested in the output to make themselves look good) to abandon the known and use the unknown.
The IDE and scalability issues are important, but will be solved over time. Changing the mentality of entrenched people is a whole different issue.
Posted by:Shu Chow at April 6, 2006 08:06 AM
I will bite, I will even risk sounding like one of the mentioned Lisp and Smalltalk developers.
I have had a quick look at Ruby, and I do like it (mainly because it reminds me of Smalltalk), but I have never tried using it in anger. So the following is a real question that I have not seen answered before.
What is it that Ruby has that Smalltalk doesn‘t? What makes Ruby an improvement on Smalltalk? Why should I program in Ruby and not Smalltalk (or Squeak)?
(I do believe that Lisp programmers have the right to claim that Lisp is the best thing since sliced bread; it is truly different - infinite cosmic power in tiny little space.)
Posted by: Petar Bodor at April 6, 2006 08:29 AM
I completely agree with Shu Chow. So let‘s stop talking about technical merits. These are precise points why Ruby/Rails will never become ‘enterprisish‘.
Posted by: Kent at April 6, 2006 08:31 AM
Thank you for the kind writeup, Cedric. I definitely agree that Ruby on Rails has a tough road ahead becoming truly mainstream. That road is always tough, for any technology. Less for technical reasons and more for cultural and marketing reasons.
But nothing gets me fired up like knowing we have something valuable that lots of people haven‘t discovered or experienced yet.
Although evangelism and rhetorics sometimes do bore. Perhaps I should just, as the guy with the God complex, widely considered to be arrogant, and once called "king of the internet", pass down some stone tablets and command people to obey. Free will is overrated. (hm)
Posted by:David Heinemeier Hansson at April 6, 2006 08:53 AM
Like you, I feel rails is fantastic. Also, like you, I don‘t think it will ever be mainstream. My reasons for thinking this are, however, a little different. Namely, I can‘t have a UI in rails, and use nutch as the backend as far as I know.
Posted by:Hasan at April 6, 2006 10:07 AM
Cedric,
I agree with what you are saying for the most part, but the integration argument may not be as bad as everyone thinks. With Web Services making another push with SOA architectures, ROR is positioned OK. The web services support is pretty intuitive and I have to admit it beats Java Web Services support IMO.
The things that are a sore spot for me, at least from an integration viewpoint, is the lack of asynchronous processing(ie JMS), thin at best operational support (ie JMX), and deployment issues in general. And I still haven‘t seen a great solution for multiple application deployments without Session management problems.
But like you said, the ROR community is tenacious in their defense of the framework, so I‘m sure they will solve these problems over time.
Posted by: Frank Bolander at April 6, 2006 10:29 AM
Shu Chow has hit the nail right on the head. Go into any Fortune 100 or 500 IT department and talk to the "architecture team" that set‘s corporate direction and see how many even know what Ruby or RoR is.
It will take years of progression both at the grass roots level (there usually are small teams that are talented and tend to experiment) and at the CIO level usually because some high paid consultants or analysts (Gartner) are waving the banner.
I think the grass roots is moving forward nicely, now show me how the Rails community to working the other half of the equation.
-db
Posted by:dsb at April 6, 2006 11:11 AM
To Jan Prill, please don‘t prop Penny Arcade as some exaple of Rails‘ scalablity. As I understand it, the app doesn‘t even run dynamically, they use tools written in ROR to generate static HTML, so the number of ROR users is in single digits while Apache does the heavy lifting of serving millions of HTML files. More importantly the PA crew has had trouble since switching to ROR with not being able to make updates with the tools and/or updates not being available to the viewers....to the point where Tyco made a public apology for the constants delays a week or two ago. This is not a bright shining light of Ruby scalability...and it‘s not really an ‘enterprise‘ app to start with, it‘s a glorified blog.
Posted by: adw at April 6, 2006 12:51 PM
I came to much the same conclusion, but instead of posting a well reasoned argument decided to stick with charts and graphis:
http://zacker.org/ruby-on-rails
Posted by:Zack Rosen at April 6, 2006 05:50 PM
Hi,
when reading your article, it occurred to me that all the arguments you used (maybe beside the one about complexity of RoR itself) were actually used to tell us why PHP will never be mainstream.
This was back in 1998 or so, but hey!
What I want to say is that only time will tell. There‘s no point in speculating now what‘s going to be mainstream then. Personally, I think ruby has some nice advantages over PHP for example and I think with the time progressing it really might break through.
If it doesn‘t, it won‘t stop me using RoR though as it fits my needs in many projects.
Philip
Posted by:Philip Hofstetter at April 7, 2006 01:47 AM
> Still no credible IDE
Komodo works very well for me as Ruby IDE
Posted by: mvp at April 7, 2006 01:48 AM
@adw: Ok, admitted. But does that mean that rails doesn‘t scale? All I‘ve said is that cedric didn‘t made his research homework. There are rails apps that scale. Look at the wiki page and ask people before writing that there is no proof that rails scales other than the 37signals products. It scales as well as any other technology that shares nothing. PHP scales great for yahoo. Scaling is a matter of the setup and isn‘t ‘easy‘ on java either. Once again: It‘s amazing what DHH and the community of rails did with ror and their tools (capistrano) that address your scaling needs.
Posted by: Jan Prill at April 7, 2006 02:05 AM
I agree with a lot of this post. I too am learning ruby, and love the language, but it is not an easy language compared to say php. Furthermore I am worried about scalability. Finally I believe there are now other ruby frameworks being developped, no idea if they are any good.
Posted by:Christian at April 7, 2006 02:10 AM
Further views on scalability: http://poocs.net/articles/2006/03/13/the-adventures-of-scaling-stage-1
Posted by:Kartik Agaram at April 7, 2006 02:10 AM
Further views on scalability: http://poocs.net/articles/2006/03/13/the-adventures-of-scaling-stage-1
Posted by:Kartik Agaram at April 7, 2006 02:10 AM
I‘m not sure it matters if Rails hits the mainstream. Its hit "mainstream enough" that most web developers have at least heard of it by now. If fortune 500s aren‘t using or exploring new things, its because they‘re completely entrenched.
Rails is perfect for quickly setting up satellite applications around monolithic enterprise apps through web services. If the architects aren‘t looking at ways to speed things up, they will start losing ground in their respective marketplaces to quicker, dryer methods like Rails.
Posted by: Pete at April 7, 2006 02:23 AM
Reading the comments section I can see the real reason why Ruby will never catch on you people are worse then Mormons going door to door!
language != application
Posted by: Joe at April 7, 2006 03:00 AM
I haven‘t read all your post yet, but my first thought when reading the title was : "do you remember what your first prediction about the ipod was ?" :-)
Posted by:Guillaume Laurent at April 7, 2006 03:15 AM
If you check out Tiobe Software‘s monthly programming language popularity index you‘ll see that it has shot up 14 places in the past year and is now in the top 20.
http://www.tiobe.com/index.htm?tiobe_index
Posted by:James McKay at April 7, 2006 03:17 AM
There is no "One True Way" as far as programming (web or not) is concerned. One True Way only exists in Star Wars, and even there there are 2 avenues to that way (dark/light). Those who claim "one true way" are extreme fanatics and we all see where extreme fanaticism is taking the world right now.
Every project has potentialy a platform and language that would fit it more than others, and every project should weight its requirements and try to fit the platform around them. It might be Lisp, C, Java, PHP, Python, Rubi and what have you.
I‘m currently reading The Art of Unix Programming, by Eric Raymond and its a damn good read and somewhat related to this argument.
It‘s available here: http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/
Posted by:Harel at April 7, 2006 03:36 AM
What do you use an IDE for? Do you write code in it, test the code out, and move it to a Bank of Good Code? That‘s what irb can do; the read-eval-print loop in Ruby/Python/PLT Scheme/etc are remarkably helpful for development.
Posted by:lee at April 7, 2006 03:39 AM
What do you use an IDE for? Do you write code in it, test the code out, and move it to a Bank of Good Code? That‘s what irb can do; the read-eval-print loop in Ruby/Python/PLT Scheme/etc are remarkably helpful for development.
Posted by:lee at April 7, 2006 03:39 AM
Cedric,
Great post. I‘m an EXTREMELY recent convert to Ruby and Rails so perhaps I can provide a fresh perspective on this. I have posted a rebuttal of sorts on my blog
http://livingincode.blogspot.com/2006/04/rails-wont-become-mainstream.html
--
Adam Schepis
http://livingincode.blogspot.com
Posted by:Adam Schepis at April 7, 2006 03:47 AM
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