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Ruby is a wonderful language. It would be great if there was some deep-pocketed multinational willing to fund its development in the same way as Facebook has do
by rmchugh 12y ago
Ruby is a wonderful language. It would be great if there was some deep-pocketed multinational willing to fund its development in the same way as Facebook has done for PHP or Google has done for Python.
- jxf 12y agoHeroku pays Ko1 and Matz [0], and Heroku is owned by Salesforce, which is a public company. Granted, Salesforce doesn't have Google or FB's war chest -- but it's not like Ruby isn't being supported by companies. [0]: https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/7/12/matz_joins_heroku https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/7/12/matz_joins_heroku
- arnvald 12y agoApart from Koichi, there's one more person - Nobu - who is working on CRuby full-time. Nobu's the guy with most commits to CRuby. Matz now does not work on CRuby, only on MRuby and the language specification. It's also worth noticing that another implementation, JRuby is supported by Redhat. IIRC 2 people work on it full-time: Charles Nutter (Headius) and Thomas Enebo
- nirvdrum 12y agoThere's a few of us at Oracle working on an alternative backend via JRuby, as well. Chris Seaton gave a talk on it at RubyConf last week. He has a series of posts about it that are pretty good: http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/ http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/ Obviously, this isn't people being directly paid to work on MRI, but there are side benefits like a richer set of rubyspecs and sometimes fixes landing in MRI.
- timr 12y agoThat was a great talk -- really sort of mind-warping to think that there are people working on "de-optimizing" the JVM so that Ruby can run faster in the average case.
- rmchugh 12y agothanks for that, wasn't aware of that connection.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoI wouldn't say Facebook funds the development of PHP per se, but they do fund the development of HHVM and they made the initial draft of the language spec.
- dons 12y agoThere's only so much money you can throw at broken language designs and still expect a reasonable return.
- JohnBooty 12y agoI'll bite. What's broken?
- monk_e_boy 12y agoYeah, I'd be interested too. I code PHP, Ruby, Python, C#, js and all of them have quirks and stuff. But Python and Ruby are almost identical other than some syntax sugar. PHP is PHP. $needle, $haystack gets me everytime. JS is just evil. Fucking hate that language. Dog turd. C# is nice, a bit verbose.
- meowface 12y agoI think he's a troll.
- rpeden 12y agoHe's a smart guy, a Haskell programmer, and co-author of a pretty great Haskell book. I don't think he's a troll; it just seems that his opinion of Ruby is influenced by experience in other languages.
- twelvechairs 12y agoIf he doesn't want to elucidate his point, its basically trolling, no matter what your experience. Its a line designed to draw a rise out of people - that's it.
- slunk 12y agoAre you suggesting that ruby's design is more broken than PHP's?
- 12y ago
- esaym 12y agoI could say the same for perl, or anything really.
- throwaway9821 12y agoWhat has Google done for Python? The only story I know of is Unladen Swallow, which was a side project that ultimately failed.
- mikeyouse 12y agoOthers will know more, but at very least, they hired Guido for ~7 years and let him spend half of his time working on improving python.
- throwaway9821_2 12y ago[Same person, lost password for the previous throwaway] Hiring GvR is better than nothing, but still a very long way from a "deep-pocketed multinational funding Python development".
- rmchugh 12y agoperhaps a bit of an exaggeration. i apologise. i suppose i'm mainly bitter about PHP. It completely baffles me that FB have invested so much money in the language ecosystem
- loganfrederick 12y agoEnova Financial in Chicago employs Brian Shirai to work on Rubinius, a new implementation of Ruby. http://rubini.us/ http://rubini.us/