Es funkelt, ich will es!

Ruby ist ja gerade in aller Munde. Auch ich fummel mich da gerade ein. Wirklich nicht schlecht... im Vergleich zu PHP.
Hier gibts z.B. richtig auf's Maul:
10 Reasons why PHP is Still Better than Ruby ;-)
10 Reasons why Ruby is better than PHP

Aber wie sieht es um die Zukunft der Sprache aus. Es ist eben nicht alles Rubin was rot funkelt. Soll ich "Chris" glauben oder der wilden Fanboyhorde?
Und was ist schon Zukunft? Sachen&Dinge ändern sich so schnell... und meist unerwartet...

chris said on Saturday, June 27, 2009:
Unfortunately I dont’ believe Ruby will be there big time in 10 years from now i.e it will still be a small niche player.

I have played with ruby myself a little bit, on and off since 2006 , I know I am a late comer. these are my thoughts about Ruby.

1) after so many years, it’s still like 2% in the Tiobe ranking

2) its weak typing, many people have said this is an asset, but I don’t. agree. Weak typing is a dsadvantage in my experience (working with very large apps in a big Financial Institution, running 24×7 ). Rubyists have always countered with a “do more testing” approach , but I don’t agree this will catch all your problems. I believe you have to have strong typing combined with a “do more testing” approach is better, especially when you are working in large teams where every one can touch any code.

3) speed is still a problem after so many years, everyone knows it’s a problem and yet the community is so slow to address that.

4) by the time, the ruby language and framework, has fixed its problems, the fad will have died and tne crowd will have moved on to the next big thing.

5) features in ruby is being and will be copied in existing languages and new languages

6) there are too many ways of doing the same thing in Ruby and this is a disadvantage as well, as this means if you are working in a big team, you have to learn every little nut and bolt of the language to be able support an application. that means, the learning curve is actually higher. In a one man team this is ok, because that one man picks one style and sticks to it and doesn’t have to worry about other people’s coding. It’s like driving on the street, you don’t have to think if the car next to you is going to drive left or right, and this prevents accidents. can you imagine for one moment that people are allowed to drive left and right in any direction ? what will happen?
I am aware that Saphire is trying to redo Ruby, with only one way of doing things. maybe this will help.

7) I think it’s safer in terms of longevity of languages to stay with Java and .net. because at some point Ruby will be forked and a new variant with a lot of differnt things added, will come out, fragmenting the market even more, which will reduce the current 2% to even less.

8) the big institutions are not doing Ruby. only startups, with basic CRUD applications.

9) last but not the least, the absence of a specification hurts the language. by the time the specs will come out and “accepted” by the community, it will be too late. Languages like Scala will already be well established.

10) the community looks and acts too amateurish. I don’t believe even Sun’s and Microsoft’s presence will be able to change that. Unless they fork their own versions, in which case that will cause fragmentation of the ruby community, with its adverse impacts to the ruby community as a whole.

anyway these are my thoughts. sure people may disagree with what I said, but every one is free to one’s own opinion. Let’s wait and see, only the future will tell whether one is right or not