# Zed Shaw on Ruby Pros/Cons: You Used Ruby to Write WHAT? **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [March 4, 2008, 4:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/zed-shaw-on-ruby-pros-cons-you-used-ruby-to-write-what/130932 "2008-03-04T16:20:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/df788c/32.png) [@estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/estherschindler)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2008, 4:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/zed-shaw-on-ruby-pros-cons-you-used-ruby-to-write-what/130932/1 "2008-03-04T16:20:42Z")
At [CIO.com](http://CIO.com): You Used Ruby to Write WHAT?! Deciding when to use any language – including Ruby – depends on the appropriateness to task and the amount of yak shaving necessary. Zed Shaw explains when Ruby’s MRI or JRuby is the best language for the job, and when it really isn’t. > **[5 myths and realities of IT culture change](https://www.cio.com/article/191000)** > > To drive digital transformation, IT organizations must embrace change. Ineffective or outdated notions of what it takes can derail success. ---
**Author:** ![estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/df788c/32.png) [@estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/estherschindler)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2008, 8:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/zed-shaw-on-ruby-pros-cons-you-used-ruby-to-write-what/130932/2 "2008-03-04T20:12:42Z")
On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 7:20 AM, estherschindler [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > At [CIO.com](http://CIO.com): > > You Used Ruby to Write WHAT?! > > Deciding when to use any language – including Ruby – depends on the > appropriateness to task and the amount of yak shaving necessary. Zed > Shaw explains when Ruby’s MRI or JRuby is the best language for the > job, and when it really isn’t. > > [http://www.cio.com/article/191000](http://www.cio.com/article/191000) I’ll use language a little less colorful than Zed himself might use in talking about MRI, Rails, and the Ruby Community outside of the pages of CIO, and say the article has some problems. Zed seems to think that Rails is the start and end of Ruby for the web, which is odd given his fabulous explosion and his comments about the other Ruby web frameworks in that explosion and how those other frameworks made the Rails core team squirm. Its one thing for Zed’s corporate, writing-for-pay persona to differ from his writing-on-my-own-time persona in attitude (it is, I’d say, pretty essential) but its another thing for his writing-for-pay persona to be completely ignorant of basic and relevant facts that his other persona is clearly aware of. The article is also self-contradictory in several places (this seems to be a feature of this series of articles in CIO), at one point he mentions, as a plus,the fact that MRI can easily tie to code in C for portions of an application that need it, and later he says if your application needs intensive calculations, you should not use Ruby for the application but use C, C++, Fortran, or Java. Why he doesn’t suggest simply factoring out the computation-intensive portion to C or Java (depending on whether the rest of the app is JRuby or MRI) and using Ruby for the rest, which would be in line with his earlier positive comments, I don’t know. Its almost like each paragraph was written in isolation by a different person. Similarly, he talks about people “giving up” on writing servers in Ruby and resorting to Ruby+C as a weakness, after having described C interfacing in MRI as a strength – and he uses this to argue that Ruby is unsuitable for use in such projects, even though part of the support for it is people choosing to use Ruby in exactlythe way he earlier mentions as one of its strengths. “Ruby’s good for DSLs, which are easy to implement!”, “Ruby’s bad for DSLs because Ruby DSLs don’t have intelligible errors!”. I don’t understand what the utility of the article is supposed to be. If you don’t already know anything about Ruby, its not going to help a lot in making a decision about using it in any given project, because its too scattershot with its often contradictory categorical statements about what Ruby should and should not be used for. And if you know even a little about Ruby, you’ll probably know more than the article gives you about any of the issues it presents. About the only thing it seems useful for is as a tool for a manager that doesn’t know much about Ruby looking to justify making a decision that’s really been made for some other reason. And there, the contradictions are probably useful, since you can pick the one that goes with the decision you’ve already made and ignore the other. ---
**Author:** ![estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/df788c/32.png) [@estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/estherschindler)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2008, 8:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/zed-shaw-on-ruby-pros-cons-you-used-ruby-to-write-what/130932/3 "2008-03-04T20:49:32Z")
Christopher D. wrote: > On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 7:20 AM, estherschindler [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > > > [http://www.cio.com/article/191000](http://www.cio.com/article/191000) > > I’ll use language a little less colorful than Zed himself might use in talking > about MRI, Rails, and the Ruby Community outside of the pages of CIO, > and say the article has some problems. I’m a bit surprised he didn’t take the easy shots at ruby: not suitable for hard real time, for device drivers, for SMP, for embedding multiple interpreters in a process, for very low memory situations. Most IT managers won’t know these things unless you tell them, no matter how obvious they are to programmers. Anyway, he seems to know about web and java gui, but not much about some of the other topics he mentions. “Large data crunching”? What about Ara Howard’s work at NOAA? “Image manipulation”? Ditto. He briefly appears to discount Event Machine without naming it or giving specifics about why it’s not suitable for “server protocols” (if he has a reason, I’d like to know it!). I’ve found ruby extremely useful (with a bit of C code compiled on the fly) for simulations that involve “heavy math or computation” and for DSLs to specify and manage those simulations. ---
**Author:** ![estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/df788c/32.png) [@estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/estherschindler)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2008, 9:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/zed-shaw-on-ruby-pros-cons-you-used-ruby-to-write-what/130932/4 "2008-03-04T21:35:54Z")
I was surprised to see his claim that Rails isn’t any good for writing a CMS, yet Django is. Having easily written a few CMS-like apps in Rails, I have NO idea what his thoughts are there. Is it the blocking file upload issue? ---
**Author:** ![estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/df788c/32.png) [@estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/estherschindler)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2008, 9:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/zed-shaw-on-ruby-pros-cons-you-used-ruby-to-write-what/130932/5 "2008-03-04T21:02:32Z")
On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 1:47 PM, Joel VanderWerf [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > for hard real time, for device drivers, for SMP, for embedding multiple > code compiled on the fly) for simulations that involve “heavy math or > computation” and for DSLs to specify and manage those simulations. I agree he skipped over some things (both bad and good), but I think his general point was that Ruby in a web production environment can be a feisty animal (he mentioned math, but only briefly, and was clearly unaware of some number-crunching that people have done). But, just like with any language, I suppose you need good programmers to have good programs. The only difference that I personally see is how easy a particular language can allow someone to write bad code, and I think that’s what he was trying to get at. Todd ---
**Author:** ![estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/df788c/32.png) [@estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/estherschindler)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2008, 11:54pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/zed-shaw-on-ruby-pros-cons-you-used-ruby-to-write-what/130932/6 "2008-03-04T23:54:11Z")
On Wed, 5 Mar 2008, Mark T. wrote: > I was surprised to see his claim that Rails isn’t any good for writing > a CMS, yet Django is. Having easily written a few CMS-like apps in > Rails, I have NO idea what his thoughts are there. Is it the blocking > file upload issue? The relevant paragraph is: “The caveat on Ruby for Web programming is that Rails is better suited for building Web applications. I’ve seen many projects attempt to create a WebDAV server or a content management system (CMS) with Rails and fail miserably. While you can do a CMS in Rails, there are much more efficient technologies for the task, such as Drupal and Django. (In fact, I’d say if you’re looking at a Java Portal development effort, you should evaluate Drupal and Django for the task instead.)” Zed does seem to fall into the common trap here of criticizing Ruby via a Rails weakness (or perceived Rails weakness). I find Ruby to be a brilliant language to use for CMS systems, and have been doing CMS work with Ruby (using IOWA) for many years. The attributes of Rails may or may not make CMS systems easy to write, but that’s hardly a weakness of Ruby. Kirk H. ---
**Author:** ![estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/df788c/32.png) [@estherschindler](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/estherschindler)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2008, 9:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/zed-shaw-on-ruby-pros-cons-you-used-ruby-to-write-what/130932/7 "2008-03-04T21:51:21Z")
On 3/4/08, Mark T. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > I was surprised to see his claim that Rails isn’t any good for writing > a CMS, yet Django is. Having easily written a few CMS-like apps in > Rails, I have NO idea what his thoughts are there. Is it the blocking > file upload issue? Same here, multiple CMS’s under my belt using Rails, no major problems. My experience with Django, on the other hand, was a complete pain. Having to place models in “apps” is dumb. An inverted template system is even dumber.