Good point. I guess from an evangelism perspective, it makes sense to
talk to everyone who walks by the soapbox, as there’s something for
everyone. Even so, if the path to significant adoption = IronRuby
Evangelists => Rubyists => .NET Foot Soldiers, I’ll eat my hat.
Fortunately, it’s made of food.
On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Nathan Stults [email protected] wrote:
But isn’t the C-Ruby or J-Ruby crowd deploying primarily on Windows a
pretty small group, all in all? Aren’t most Ruby dev’s working on Linux?
After all, Ruby is considerably faster on Linux. I’m having a hard time
imagining what the value proposition is for this demographic, who
shouldn’t really need to convert, but simply be willing to consider
IronRuby as an alternative deployment option for Windows. Maybe I’m just
being pessimistic, but I see convincing established Ruby developers to
leave their stable, mature interpreters and libraries for 0.x IronRuby
to gain access to .NET, and at the same time wave goodbye to Ruby 1.9,
somewhat steeper of a climb than peddling dynamic languages, Ruby and
IronRuby, to the existing .NET community.
What about RubyCocoa and Flex development? Not all Ruby is pure web or
console scripts. Apple got Ruby devs working on their platform (or maybe
vice versa). Why not Ruby WPF or Ruby Silverlight (via Ivan’s IronNails
or Jimmy’s silverline)? It’s not a major jump, but it gives them easier
access to Windows client development. If nothing else, they may be able
to help evangelize the C# and VB.NET stalwarts and show them a better
way.
On a related vein, I got some news from the Rails core team a couple of
days ago that the Rails documentation is viewed by Windows machines 50%
of the time. The Rails core team sees Windows developers as a huge group
of people to make happy.
Ruby is considerably faster on Linux
Unfortunately, that was true with previous builds of Ruby, but the new
revived RubyInstaller project is building Ruby with more modern
compilers, getting the speed up to what Ruby on Linux is: See
On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 12:08 AM, Nathan Stults [email protected]wrote:
Good point. I guess from an evangelism perspective, it makes sense to
talk to everyone who walks by the soapbox, as there’s something for
everyone. Even so, if the path to significant adoption = IronRuby
Evangelists => Rubyists => .NET Foot Soldiers, I’ll eat my hat JFortunately, it’s made of food.
Well, since I’m taking that approach atm, here’s to good health and tasty
hats!
But isn’t the C-Ruby or J-Ruby crowd deploying primarily on Windows a
pretty small group, all in all?
This is true. But mostly because none of them actually work for Windows
shops, because if a shop is open to C-Ruby or J-Ruby they are not a
Windows shop. Almost a Catch 22.
After all, Ruby is considerably faster on Linux.
This is true too - but only compared to Ruby on Windows. The MRI
compared to anything else (any other language) is like treacle. In fact,
I always strongly recommend JRuby to all my clients, and one of our
flagship products (Mingle) has been on JRuby since JRuby 0.9. Pretty
much the only thing I miss on JRuby in terms of libraries is RCov -
everything else has been ported, or better options exist in Java
already. Of course, the fact that JRuby is way faster than MRI helps,
and from everything I’ve seen IronRuby is going to be just as quick, if
not quicker.
Now, most shops are either Java or .Net and honestly, at the end of the
day, this is with reference to the supported production environment,
really, not the languages used. Taking myself as an example, I believe
Ruby is a good idea so solve certain problems, and I can (and do) make a
strong case for Ruby in Java shops thanks to JRuby. With IronRuby
becoming mainstream, I can now start to make a case for it, and this is
what I’m trying to get at. It will be dedicated Rubyists that make the
point that a Windows production environment and a Ruby project are no
longer a contradiction in terms, not unconvinced VB.Net devs or a suit
that showed up at a MS dev day by mistake. It’s the early adopters that
evangelise, and someone who has only ever done C# since 2002 because his
employers asked him to clearly isn’t an early adopter.
And finally, the most crucial point for me: The .Net world doesn’t
contain the most avid open source contributors (or even users) in the
world. Not by a long shot. The Java world does, and the Ruby world is
nothing but avid open source contributors and users. This is why you see
JRuby grow a viable ecosystem in no time at all, with all significant
gems ported and production deployments even before a 1.0. Without that,
you simply do not have enough tools and libraries to build stuff.
Encouraging developers and maintainers of popular Ruby gems to support
and innovate on IronRuby is of the utmost importance. And almost every
single popular gem is developed on either OSX or Linux - which means
IronRuby building and running smoothly on both Linux and OSX is
essential to get the ecosystem going.
Anyways, long story short, when we get to a point where a hacker can
confidently offer to solve a problem with a Ruby app (especially in the
enterprise, because here there be dragons) even though its a Windows
shop, we’ve achieved critical mass. Then its all downhill from there.
and OSX is essential to get the ecosystem going.
I agree 100%. This is why I spent a lot of time running IronPython on
Mono
in 2006 and 2007, and I believe this is of critical importance for
IronRuby too,
but this doesn’t seem to be too popular here…
dont forget that since rails devs are always looking for ways to squeeze
some more performance from their poorly performing c-ruby, if ironruby
performs considerably faster than MRI and JRuby, some dedicated windows
rails servers will start to pop up. it will be easier in every possible
way
for a .net dev to deploy, run and manage.
i think this is the major ‘selling’ point – bigger share for windows
servers and bigger opportunities for .net developers at the end of the
day.
You’re probably right, you have a much broader perspective than I do
(Windows/MS only) and on the larger scale, I can see how acceptance of
IronRuby as a first class Ruby platform by the Ruby community will make
or break its ultimate success. And I see what you mean about the nature
of the OSS communities of the various platforms. Actually, my biggest
fear for IronRuby is that the community won’t port enough of the native
components of the Ruby libraries to make it a truly viable option,
exactly because the .NET OSS community isn’t as robust, so engaging Ruby
developers to step in and help get the work done does seem absolutely
critical, in retrospect far more critical than convincing existing .NET
developers to slowly start dipping their toes in IronRuby, as progress
in that direction is not likely to move the platform towards parity with
the other Ruby interpreters, which is the key component. Thanks for the
schooling.
