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You know what really bothers me about ruby? It seems like it's the smaller companies who are behind it - like EngineYard and 37Signals. None of the heavyweights
by markessien 18y ago
You know what really bothers me about ruby? It seems like it's the smaller companies who are behind it - like EngineYard and 37Signals. None of the heavyweights seem to be interested in Ruby.
This seems to me to be a bad thing for the long term prospects for the language. Big companies think long term, small companies tend to change their focus often. If I'm going to invest my time in a language, I want it to stick around for long.
- moonpolysoft 18y agoMicrosoft pays John Lam and the DLR team to work on IronRuby full time. Sun pays Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo to work on JRuby. Thoughtworks pays Ola Bini to work on JRuby as well. So there are some larger companies that are investing in Ruby implementations.
- markessien 18y agoThey are paying people to add support for niche languages to their tools. IronRuby sells Visual Studio, JRuby promotes Java. MS and Sun are interested in their tools, not in Ruby.
- moonpolysoft 18y agoOf course. They can't make money directly off of Ruby. Neither can EY or 37signals. For that matter, Sun doesn't directly make money off of Java either. And Microsoft doesn't make a lot of money from .Net (it's arguable over whether you'd consider visual studio sales directly attributable to .Net.) The point here is that for EY, Sun, and MS their platforms are loss leaders for very profitable goods and services. And if those companies are paying people to work on Ruby for their platforms, that means they're betting that Ruby support will lead to greater platform adoption, which then leads to greater server sales.