You may be right. Probably the biggest challenge of JRuby (even bigger than getting full POSIX filesystem support, native libraries/ extensions, libc-like buffered/unubuffered IO, and a whole slew of other features) has been knocking down the "us vs them" barrier between the two worlds. Among Rubyists, JRuby is still often seen as "that Java thing", and they seem to have taken a solemn oath to never touch anything Java-related. On the Java side, folks are reluctant to stray too far from Java-like languages, and see Ruby as a cocky young upstart getting too much press for too little power.
Of course neither attitude is healthy; Ruby and Rails are without a doubt outstanding tools for building web applications, and on JRuby most of the typical complaints about the Ruby platform are addressed (performance, scaling, memory management, stability). And of course the Ruby world can usually get those benefits just by switching to JRuby, though their biases against "Java" often keep them from even trying. You can imagine it's a frustrating situation for us :) On Sep 12, 7:15 pm, Andrew <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Charlie, > > Personally (and I may be wrong...) I think there is a bit of a > reluctance in the Java community to embrace anything that also has an > existence outside of the JVM. I think there is a bit of an "Us (Java) > versus them (Ruby)" mentality, sadly. > > Also, there's a thread here from 2009 that touched on some of the > attitudes towards (J)Ruby - not sure if you've seen it. > > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg05371.html > > Andrew. > > Twitter: @am2605 > > On Sep 12, 4:19 pm, Charles Oliver Nutter <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > On Sep 9, 11:17 pm, Sean Griffin <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > My intention is not as sensational as my subject, but it's succinct so > > > I'll go with it. > > > FWIW, I'm surprised JRuby doesn't come up more. Perhaps people don't > > think about it because they feel Ruby is a "non-JVM" language more > > than a JVM language? > > > Ruby the language (not necessarily on JRuby) likely has more users > > worldwide than Groovy, Scala, and Clojure combined. By conservative > > estimates there are 500k-1M folks using Ruby. There are dozens of Ruby > > conferences around the world; I'll be attending 6 total this fall in > > the US, Japan, Brazil, and Uruguay, and more this spring in Europe and > > India. So it can't be that there's not a community to support it. > > > JRuby itself has defeated the idea that "Ruby is slow" already, and in > > the next release Ruby performance for many things will start to > > approach Java...even without requiring static types and other dynlang" > > impurities. For small benchmarks, JRuby master has exceeded the > > performance of all other dynamic languages on the JVM already. > > > JRuby integrates very well with Java, implementing interfaces (at > > runtime or ahead-of-time), extending classes, and of course calling > > any Java class as if it were just another Ruby class. The vast > > majority of integration cases work just fine, and most folks that > > choose JRuby do so explicitly because it integrates so well. > > > I suppose the big reason people may not consider Ruby is due to the > > differing syntax and some oddities in the language? I don't find the > > syntax that far off from Java...mostly it's replacing {} with > > do...end, using @foo for instance variables, and omitting visibility > > modifiers. So I think this is a red herring too. > > > I'd like to hear why nobody on this thread has even mentioned JRuby, > > especially if it's something we've failed to do in the implementation > > that keeps people away. > > > - Charlie -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
