The Ruby Revolution Take Ii

[caption id=“attachment_638” align=“alignright” width=“300” caption=“Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi”][/caption]

My recent ‘Ruby revolution being over’ blog post generated quite a lot of comments. Let’s be honest, I did not expect less from the readers.

However, I noticed three types of reactions I would like to address:

• It was not a Ruby revolution, it was a Rails revolution

• The revolution has stalled due to no major enterprise backing

• The revolution will only be over when we will reach a greater adoption

First of all, as Joe correctly mentioned, for me, the revolution is not about specifics or individuals. It’s really about the big picture.

The influence Ruby had and still has on the IT world seems to be undermined by some. Ruby is a dynamic, truly Object Oriented programming scripting language designed for humans first. The real paradigm shift is in the fact that Ruby was designed to make programming fast, enjoyable and easy instead of being optimized for the machines running it. This is for me the essence of the revolution and it is meant to transcend the scope of the Ruby language.

The way I see it, Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) is more of an artist than a technician. He had a vision for software development. Programming languages cannot be optimized/designed for both machines and humans, the language designer has to choose which one he wants to privilege.

Most programming languages believe that it’s up to the programmer to make an extra effort since he is smarter and easier to optimize than a machine. Matz questioned this approached and decided to turn things around. The result is one of the reasons why developers seem to just fall in love with Ruby.

It was not a Ruby revolution, it was a Rails revolution.

I am not denying that there also was a Rails revolution. But if you look at it, Rails and its revolution are a direct effect from Ruby’s revolution. One might argue that it is actually an extension of Ruby’s philosophy. But what is Rails if not a web framework designed to make web development fast, easy and enjoyable? Without Ruby there would not have been Rails and that was my point, the underlying revolution comes from the language itself.

The revolution has stalled due to no major enterprise backing.

That’s an interesting comment. It is true that .NET and Java are still dominating the enterprise world. But let’s be clear, Ruby was not designed to please “suit people”. And to this day, there is still a strong feeling, from some individuals against the enterprise. In the past, DHH openly said that he did not care nor wanted to hear about the enterprise, more recently, Obie Fernandez, during one of his talks said: “Fuck the enterprise” (49:39). But the truth is that Ruby and the so called enterprise, both, are changing. The smart people in the enterprise world saw potential in Ruby and decided to give it a chance. An easy way to include Ruby’s philosophy without breaking the fragile enterprise equilibrium was to inject Ruby in the midst of well known and respected technologies such as Java and .NET. The enterprise can now use “re-branded Ruby versions” with “new taste or ‘improved’ flavor” like JRuby, Scala, groovy, IronRuby. I work for some enterprise clients and I can tell you that they ‘also’ use Ruby. Mainly because developers love the language. Microsoft, Apple and SAP investing in their own implementation of the language is yet another example that the enterprise recognizes the value of Matz’s work. Nobody can blame them to try to make Ruby fit more their requirements. So, at the end of the day, Ruby is not the #1 enterprise language and Rails isn’t used by the large majority of enterprise web apps, but that is NOT the point. Ruby has influenced the enterprise and we will see its effects for many years.

The revolution will only be over when we will reach a greater adoption

Saying that is missing the point entirely. A revolution is a step towards a situation change. Things don’t change right away after a revolution. It takes a long time for mentalities to evolve and for people to change their habits. The consequences of a revolution are to be studied over the decades following the event. Take smalltalk for instance. Smalltalk adoption was not that great, however it brought a paradigm shift that directly influenced languages such as Ruby, Python and Objective-C. So, again, do not focus on the adoption but instead look at the influence of the Ruby revolution and the ripple effect around it.