Of course there's also the another issue...
If you just need a little dynamic scripting in a larger picture, you can
do this with minimal work and no extra libraries in Java 6 if you use
JavaScript -- and re-use existing developer skills while you're at it.
The same can't be said for Ruby.
On 9/15/2010 9:34 AM, Jess Holle wrote:
Existence outside the JVM is one possible dimension to the reluctance
to use Ruby. For me the bigger issues with Ruby are:
1. The inability to do static typing
* An ability to easily do dynamic typing where you want is
one thing, the inability to do static typing is quite
another, though.
2. The overt "everything's a DSL" approach that Ruby seems to
encourage or at least that many folk seem to take with Ruby
* This is reminiscent of Dick's comments on LISP. Code
written by dozens of different folk seems to quite easily
end up looking more like dozens of totally different
languages.
I don't have anything against Ruby as compared to other languages with
these same issues -- but I consider both of these to be big issues.
--
Jess Holle
On 9/15/2010 8:30 AM, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
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
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