# On Enterprise Ruby **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [March 27, 2007, 2:20am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258 "2007-03-27T02:20:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 2:20am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/1 "2007-03-27T02:20:26Z")
Q: What the hell is “Enterprise Ruby” anyway? A: Yet another ‘stack’ of crap so complex that any salesperson can use Steak and Strippers to easily sell it to management thanks to the bikeshedding effect. – Zed S. (author of Mongrel) at QCon 2007 # Fellow Rubyists, Ruby is now mainstream. Like it or not, we are there. Ruby applications are now developed for banks, telecoms, investment companies, newspapers… not just cool Web 2.0 startups anymore. Every middleware, operating system and IDE product vendor has a dynamic languages strategy. This is a new situation that Ruby community has to deal with. # Why do we care? Three major reasons: 1. It gives us all an opportunity to convert our love of Ruby into a day job. If you are a good Ruby programmer in North America, there is no reason why you have to be working with Java or .NET today, unless you like it. 2. Community is changing. Ruby-talk / Rails-talk traffic is already bordering on insane, with a number of silly questions answered on page 10 of the Pickaxe steadily growing. It wasn’t like this four years ago, when I joined. 3. The threat that Zed S. refers to in the quote above. I call it “R2EE scenario”. I love #1 and hate #2, but it’s #3 I want to talk about today. # Enterprise Ruby now ThoughtWorks, the company I work for, has a fairly large number of people working on Ruby gigs. Large enough to get funding and management support for initiatives like CruiseControl.rb and Rails continuous integration build. Large enough, in fact, that we can look at our own projects and say “OK, this is what Ruby stack in the corporate IT world should look like”. Turns out, it’s LAMP, bunch of Mongrels and Rails on x86 servers. Sounds familiar, eh? OK, “enterprise” Ruby apps usually have to talk to Oracle, instead of MySQL, they may have to authenticate against LDAP or ActiveDirectory, some need messaging, reporting, or even the dreaded WS-Deathstar [© DHH]. There are some special needs. Fundamentally, though, it’s still the same straightforward approach to design and architecture that Ruby world is all about. # …and tomorrow Zed says: “Yet another ‘stack’ of crap so complex that any salesperson can use Steak and Strippers to easily sell it to management thanks to the bikeshedding effect.” Well, it may happen. Our cherished Ruby day jobs may yet turn into a nightmare of complexity and closed-sourced bloatware. Hopefully, we can at least have curly brackets instead of angled ones… Or maybe not. Agile movement, another Good Thing ™ that has recently gone mainstream, succeeded in rescuing many, in corporate IT and elsewhere, from the misery, which is heavyweight development process. This gives us hope. Maybe we can rescue ourselves and others from this other misery, which is bloated middleware? Or should we all seek refuge in “three men and a Web 2.0 site” shops? I immensely respect the aforementioned men and their lifestyle choices. Especially them whose company name starts with a number. Seriously, I do. But this is not the only way. I think, Ruby community has the opportunity, the power, and the duty to prevent R2EE from happening. # What will help? Ruby. Beautiful language that has been evolving for some years. Open-sourced and not controlled by a middleware vendor. Rails. A framework that has been extracted from a real life application to make development easier and faster. Not designed by a committee to solve every problem of the world, including the imaginary ones. Again, open-sourced and not controlled by a middleware vendor. Rails is not the last framework you will ever need (which is a good thing!), but it sets the right tone and serves as an example of what frameworks and libraries should look like in our brave new world. Experience. The history is repeated twice. First as a tragedy, and then a farce. It looks like both already happened. Now we can learn the lesson and not repeat it again. Culture. Before Ruby started turning mainstream, it was (to me, at least) this little quiet corner where one could escape the frustrations of one’s day job. Ivory tower architects who don’t code, complexity for the sake of complexity, design by committee, premature standardization - all those things did not belong here. They were culturally unacceptable. # Let’s keep it this way! Despite the popular impression, most corporate IT decision makers are not all that sensitive to Steak and Strippers. But they have to make those decisions without solid, recent, firsthand user experience to rely on. So, the Bikeshedding Effect is the problem. Technology judgments are made by people who don’t code, relying on white papers, word of mouth and “common sense”. Ruby community can affect these things. After all, people in corporate IT read blogs and go to conferences, like everybody else. They hear you. I think, we should make it “common sense” that “enterprise Ruby stack” does not have bloated middleware within it, doesn’t need it, and doesn’t want it. Make it culturally unacceptable. I want to ask one more question: why is the E-word anathema in this community? Yes, people choose fancy words for self-description. Yes, these words can become associated with bad things. And yes, staying away from the whole thing is a possible lifestyle choice. Changing the game is another equally valid choice, however. So, who or what are we, as a community, sending those “$&#\* off!” signals to? I think, we should clarify our message. It’s not “Enterprise, $&#\* off!”, it’s “Enterprise, welcome! Bloatware, $&#\* off!” – Alexey V. Ruby programmer on corporate payroll cross-posted to Ruby-talk and RubyOnRails-talk ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 12:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/2 "2007-03-27T12:49:55Z")
Alexey V. wrote: > I want to ask one more question: why is the E-word anathema in this > community? Yes, people choose fancy words for self-description. Yes, these > words can become associated with bad things. And yes, staying away from the > whole thing is a possible lifestyle choice. Changing the game is another > equally valid choice, however. So, who or what are we, as a community, > sending those “$&#\* off!” signals to? > The problem with the term “enterprise” is that it doesn’t seem to have a > clear, consistent definition as applied to software (or, indeed, to > anything else), which, in a software-centric community, makes it pretty > worthless as a description. As a result, it’s not used within the > community, and (speaking from my own point of view) we hear it from > outside the community most often as “Ruby isn’t ready for the > enterprise,” or “Ruby needs to support buzzword-feature-X to be taken > seriously in the enterprise,” so it’s quite natural that a negative > connotation should be attached - especially when those criticisms are > unjustified. Give us a rational, testable definition of “enterprise,” and I think you’ll find, negative connotations notwithstanding (and boy, do I love the term “enterprisey”), that the test will be passed without complaint. It’s just the utterly nebulous terminology (and the woolly thinking that often seems to accompany it) which gets peoples’ backs up. I see this as quite orthogonal to the “enterprise -\> bloatware” association, although that may well play a part, however justified or unjustified it is. All strictly IMHO, of course. ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 2:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/3 "2007-03-27T14:32:57Z")
As soon as i see a want-ad in Cleveland,Ohio for a rails or ruby programmer then and only then will i call ruby 'mainstream’ed enough for even becoming R2EE. The biggest thing that is working against ruby now in corporate american is the not invented here syndrome…my boss still thinks that i’m only one of three people in the US that knows Ruby As a result, it’s not used within the > community, and (speaking from my own point of view) we hear it from > outside the community most often as “Ruby isn’t ready for the > enterprise,” or “Ruby needs to support buzzword-feature-X to be taken > seriously in the enterprise,” so it’s quite natural that a negative ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 2:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/4 "2007-03-27T14:44:15Z")
On Tue, 27 Mar 2007, Alex Y. wrote: > else), which, in a software-centric community, makes it pretty worthless as a > description. Um well, it’s about as clear the expression “software that doesn’t suck”, which is intuitively understandable by anybody doing software I guess. > As a result, it’s not used within the community, and (speaking > from my own point of view) we hear it from outside the community most often > as “Ruby isn’t ready for the enterprise,” or “Ruby needs to support > buzzword-feature-X to be taken seriously in the enterprise,” so it’s quite > natural that a negative connotation should be attached - especially when > those criticisms are unjustified. Enterprise means, neither the target nor the one delivering is a 3-man shop and it’s not limited to a web-app. Enterprise means the problems you face when you’re doing big, integrated apps. > Give us a rational, testable definition of “enterprise,” and I think you’ll > find, negative connotations notwithstanding (and boy, do I love the term > “enterprisey”), that the test will be passed without complaint. It’s just > the utterly nebulous terminology (and the woolly thinking that often seems to > accompany it) which gets peoples’ backs up. Starting from the above definition and from my experience, enterprise means integrating accross system boundaries, and integrating means SOAP and XML (I am not arguing here that it can’t be done differently). And SOAP and XML is where Ruby is not shining. Thus as a colorary “Ruby is not enterprise ready” as you say. \*t – ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 2:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/5 "2007-03-27T14:47:16Z")
On 3/27/07, Dave R. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > As soon as i see a want-ad in Cleveland,Ohio for a rails or ruby > programmer then > and only then will i call ruby 'mainstream’ed enough for even becoming > R2EE. > The biggest thing that is working against ruby now in corporate american > is the > not invented here syndrome…my boss still thinks that i’m only one of > three > people in the US that knows Ruby Yeah, here in Ireland, the Team Lead asked if Ruby is so big, why aren’t we seeing it on job applications (for a Snr Java job). As if this implied some universal truth. There was lots of bottom shelf answers I could have used (it was a stupid comment) but what I said was: “They are all gone to Google or contracting” Having any significant experience with Ruby will change your perspective on programming. ‘Any old Java job’ will cease to have any meaningful attraction in a technical sense. ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 3:27pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/6 "2007-03-27T15:27:25Z")
Tomas P.'s Mailing L. wrote: > > > sending those “$&#\* off!” signals to? > > > > The problem with the term “enterprise” is that it doesn’t seem to have > > a clear, consistent definition as applied to software (or, indeed, to > > anything else), which, in a software-centric community, makes it > > pretty worthless as a description. > > Um well, it’s about as clear the expression “software that doesn’t > suck”, which is intuitively understandable by anybody doing software I > guess. > Maybe to you. Not to me. I’ve seen “enterprise” used with any/all of > the following connotations, among others: - Integrating across system boundaries (your definition) - Encompassing all business processes internally - Used in a business environment - Hot-deployable from a single central source across a network - Having live failover capabilities - Having good static analysis tools - [3,4,5] 9’s uptime All of these are completely different, and refer to wildly disparate aspects of development, deployment and use. This is my point, in a roundabout sort of way - while it’s very easy to pick on any one of these and say “because Ruby doesn’t meet this particular requirement out of the box, it’s not worth looking at any further,” that’s to ignore the successes that people are having with Ruby in otherwise traditional environments, as alluded to by the OP. \> Starting from the above definition and from my experience, enterprise \> means integrating accross system boundaries, and integrating means SOAP \> and XML (I am not arguing here that it can't be done differently). And \> SOAP and XML is where Ruby is not shining. Thus as a colorary "Ruby is \> not enterprise ready" as you say. Is that definition widely accepted? Is that what the term "enterprise" means in the expression "enterprise Ruby stack?" That's a honest question - it's not how I read it, but I'd like to hear your point of view. ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 4:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/7 "2007-03-27T16:13:35Z")
Jason R. wrote: > So yeah, no more of this “Ruby isn’t ready” crap, because it is. And > please, > stop using the word “enterprise”. It may have started off good, but scores > and scores of bad code has tarnished the word. A corollary to my other points: every time someone uses the word “enterprise,” there is almost certainly a better, more specific word for what they actually mean. A corollary to my corollary: almost every time someone uses the word “enterprise” they are misunderstood, because the listener assumes a larger subset of “enterprise” than the speaker intends. ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 3:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/8 "2007-03-27T15:42:28Z")
Personally, any (and every) time I hear the word “enterprise software”, I can only think of enormously over-engineered, bloated software full of more WTFs than you can shake a stick at, and if it actually does work is nothing short of surprising. Ruby is the language us Pragmatic programmers use. The whole point is to create only what you need and _exactly_ what you need, no more, no less, and Ruby lets us get there (at least for me) faster than any other language I’ve ever used. If the resulting product after months of development can be classified as “enterprise”, well then more the better. From personal experience, it would take me less time to write libraries that don’t exist if I’m doing major software development in Ruby than it would take me to deal with other languages with tons of said libraries, just because of the barriers intrinsic in said languages (I’m looking at you, Java). Ruby IS ready for prime time, and it has been for some time now. Just take a look at [www.revolutionhealth.com](http://www.revolutionhealth.com) if you don’t believe me. Mr AOL himself, Steve Case, is starting up a new health insurance company with a massive web portal written in Rails. So yeah, no more of this “Ruby isn’t ready” crap, because it is. And please, stop using the word “enterprise”. It may have started off good, but scores and scores of bad code has tarnished the word. Jason ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 5:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/9 "2007-03-27T17:43:05Z")
On 3/27/07, Alex Y. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > All of these are completely different, and refer to wildly disparate > aspects of development, deployment and use. > > This is my point, in a roundabout sort of way - while it’s very easy to > pick on any one of these and say “because Ruby doesn’t meet this > particular requirement out of the box, it’s not worth looking at any > further,” that’s to ignore the successes that people are having with > Ruby in otherwise traditional environments, as alluded to by the OP. You have also hit on another anti-Ruby point - that Ruby should be able to fully replace Java/C/.Net i.e. it is a requirement for enterprisey Ruby. Nobody considers that you can mix and match technology - that you could get a simple web app interface to whatever working with Rails or Camping on top of your big Java or .NET application server. Its certainly not Sun, IBM or Microsoft that are getting upset that you want to program the agile ends of your app in Ruby. You want to run your Rails apps on top of Glassfish and avail of 5/6/7 nines uptime and global transactions? Now you can. ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 5:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/10 "2007-03-27T17:45:06Z")
On 3/27/07, Alex Y. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Give us a rational, testable definition of “enterprise,” Whenever someone says “not ready for the enterprise”, the E-word usually stands for “large companies whose core business is not software”. These places typically have post-technical managers in charge of strategic IT decisions, lots of money to throw at IT problems (much more than a Web 2.0 startup), and a zoo of systems and applications, spanning the last 25 years of the history of computing. Some of those applications need to share data and otherwise cooperate. Rational enough? 🙂 Alex ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 4:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/11 "2007-03-27T16:20:36Z")
On Mar 27, 2007, at 8:45 AM, Richard C. wrote: > > three > > Having any significant experience with Ruby will change your > > perspective > > on programming. ‘Any old Java job’ will cease to have any meaningful > > attraction in a technical sense. Agreed, Ruby has ruined my Sr. Java Engineer job. I can’t tell you how many times I have thought, “Damn, this would look/work so much better if I could use Ruby.” ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 6:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/12 "2007-03-27T18:01:08Z")
On Tue, 27 Mar 2007, Alex Y. wrote: > > > > equally valid choice, however. So, who or what are we, as a community, > > > > Maybe to you. Not to me. I’ve seen “enterprise” used with any/all of the > > > > All of these are completely different, and refer to wildly disparate aspects > > > > integrating accross system boundaries, and integrating means SOAP and XML > > > > (I am not arguing here that it can’t be done differently). And SOAP and XML > > > > is where Ruby is not shining. Thus as a colorary “Ruby is not enterprise > > > > ready” as you say. > > Is that definition widely accepted? Is that what the term “enterprise” means > in the expression “enterprise Ruby stack?” That’s a honest question - it’s > not how I read it, but I’d like to hear your point of view. If you ask different people, they will tell you different things on why software sucks or not. Same with enterprise sw. You can never know for certain, but you can be pretty certain if it covers most bullet points named in this thread. \*t, turning the irony potentiometer slightly down again 😉 – ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 6:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/13 "2007-03-27T18:07:10Z")
Alexey V. wrote: > 2.0 startup), and a zoo of systems and applications, spanning the last 25 > years of the history of computing. Some of those applications need to share > data and otherwise cooperate. > > Rational enough? 🙂 > Sure 🙂 Defined like that, the statement “Ruby isn’t ready for the enterprise” is just as easily reversed - “this enterprise isn’t ready for Ruby.” I say this because there certainly are enterprises using Ruby, and using it well, now - you’re actually in a better position than me to know the truth of this. ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 6:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/14 "2007-03-27T18:50:15Z")
On 3/26/07, Alexey V. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > # Fellow Rubyists, Ruby is now mainstream. > > Like it or not, we are there. Ruby applications are now developed for banks, > telecoms, investment companies, newspapers… not just cool Web 2.0 startups > anymore. Every middleware, operating system and IDE product vendor has a > dynamic languages strategy. This is a new situation that Ruby community has > to deal with. As Yogi would say, “It’s deja-vu all over again.” Back in the late-80s/early-90s Smalltalk had made a foothold in many of those niches, particularly banking and investment, two hotbeds of Smalltalk usage were Wall Street, and the Banhofstrasse in Zurich. The driving factor was the need to do rapid application development which was well suited to a dynamic object-oriented language. IBM even had a mainframe Smalltalk for MVS and CICS. I think what threw water on this was when Java came along, it was available for no or low cost. The main Smalltalk vendors (IBM and ParcPlace Digitalk) were still trying to make big bucks from license fees. Java started building a large user base which eventually took most of the wind out of Smalltalks sails. It’s taken awhile for the realization that Java just might not be dynamic enough to sink in. So maybe Ruby has a good chance since it combines the dynamic nature of languages like Smalltalk with an even more reasonable business model than Java. – Rick DeNatale My blog on Ruby [http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/](http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/) ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 7:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/15 "2007-03-27T19:32:24Z")
On 27 Mar 2007, at 01:19, Alexey V. wrote: > community has > to deal with. Call me a reactionary, but if we all just agree to ignore them they’re bound to go away eventually. Ellie ## Eleanor McHugh Games With Brains raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds\_to? :reason ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 7:33pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/16 "2007-03-27T19:33:24Z")
On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 01:06:20AM +0900, Alex Y. wrote: > Alexey V. wrote: > […] > > > Whenever someone says “not ready for the enterprise”, the E-word usually > > stands for “large companies whose core business is not software”. > > > > These places typically have post-technical managers in charge of strategic > > IT decisions, lots of money to throw at IT problems (much more than a Web > > 2.0 startup), and a zoo of systems and applications, spanning the last 25 > > years of the history of computing. Some of those applications need to share > > data and otherwise cooperate. > > […] > > Defined like that, the statement “Ruby isn’t ready for the enterprise” > > is just as easily reversed - “this enterprise isn’t ready for Ruby.” I > > say this because there certainly are enterprises using Ruby, and using > > it well, now - you’re actually in a better position than me to know the > > truth of this. Of Ruby and “the enterprise,” which do you suppose is Mohammed and which is the mountain? Thinking in terms of enterprises needing to wise up and take advantage of what Ruby/Rails has to offer for their own good is at best altruistic and at worst self-delusional. There is an advantage to us, the early adopters (where early is defined here as before it got enterprise attention), hobbyists, and such, if we can get enterprises (i.e. the “large companies whose core business is not software” mentioned above) to use Ruby/Rails to a significant extent. That advantage is a wider range of profit opportunities with greater job security. I actually wrote a lot more after that paragraph, but it wound up being just a tangent. Ultimately, it is in our best interests to bring Ruby to the enterprise, and to do so actively rather than allowing someone who has _their_ best interests in mind do it for us. Rest assured, there will be a variety of attempts to make Ruby acceptable to the enterprise, and some of them probably won’t smell too good. Passively hoping it won’t happen or hoping that someone else will get it right is the best way to let it go wrong. > Alex > –Greg ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 8:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/17 "2007-03-27T20:06:28Z")
> > banks, telecoms, investment companies, newspapers… Every middleware, > > operating system and IDE product vendor > > Call me a reactionary, but if we all just agree to ignore them they’re > > bound to go away eventually. Nope. This is not going to happen. > Of Ruby and “the enterprise,” which do you suppose is Mohammed and which > is the mountain > Neither of them should be the mountain. > there will be a variety of attempts to make Ruby acceptable to the > enterprise > Ruby _is_ acceptable to “the enterprise”. We were saying this since a > year > and half ago, the difference now is that we have plenty of “enterprises” > who > agree with this. Alex ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 8:18pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/18 "2007-03-27T20:18:30Z")
Gregory S. wrote: > > > data and otherwise cooperate. > > > altruistic and at worst self-delusional. > > > My point was that either viewpoint is as valid as the other, not to say > > > that I prefer either one. It all depends on the specific enterprise in > > > question. \> I actually wrote a lot more after that paragraph, but it wound up being \> just a tangent. Ultimately, it is in our best interests to bring Ruby to \> the enterprise, and to do so actively rather than allowing someone who has \> \*their\* best interests in mind do it for us. We can only do that if we know what is missing, and what is not good enough. I don't know if it's possible to do a good enough job of filling in the gaps without actually being \*in\* the enterprise in question, with first-hand knowledge of the problem at hand. ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 8:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/19 "2007-03-27T20:26:30Z")
On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Alexey V. wrote: > Ruby _is_ acceptable to “the enterprise”. We were saying this since a year > and half ago, the difference now is that we have plenty of “enterprises” who > agree with this. Ruby has been acceptable to “enterprise” for a lot longer than that. I’ve been using it to deliver applications for banks, investment companies, mutual funds, construction companies, environmental management companies, and many others for 5 years. In most cases they didn’t care one whit what the implementation language was so long as the project was delivered on time and on budget. I never asked permission to start using Ruby in this way. I just started doing it and didn’t worry about it, and in 5 years I can only count a single time where I ever lost work because I was going to do it in Ruby. Most of the time businesses who’s core business is not software just did not care about the details regarding how their needs were to be fulfilled. This was true before the Rails hype, and it’s true now. We get almost every contract we go after, and they just don’t care what the programming language is. It’s in the businesses and the business units where they do deal with software and software engineering regularly that they care. Those are the places that have taken a lot longer to break into with Ruby. Kirk haines ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 10:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/20 "2007-03-27T22:01:54Z")
Gregory S. wrote: > them probably won’t smell too good. Passively hoping it won’t happen or > hoping that someone else will get it right is the best way to let it go > wrong. Probably a community effort similar to the OSS initiative is in order? – Phillip “CynicalRyan” Gawlowski Rule of Open-Source Programming #9: Give me refactoring or give me death! [Next page](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258.md?page=2)