Do you see a 'time in the industry' difference between the Ruby purists and the Java purists?
I have a stereotype of main stream Ruby developers being cocking young things in cool t-shirts who think they've discovered the secret sauce of the universe (and think they know better). (Yes, sweeping generalization.... don't hang me) On Sep 15, 11:30 pm, Charles Oliver Nutter <[email protected]> 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 -- 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.
