About Ruby again ...

Our team is back from the Pacific North West Symposium in Renton and everybody seems to be very excited about Ruby. There is also an interesting thread on Seajug as I write this. After looking at the Symposium slides, I'm highly unlikely to take another look at Groovy any time soon. Ruby or JRuby seems to be better way to go. Number of new ideas are attributed to Ruby, but not all Ruby specific: "convention over configuration" and "less is more" for example. The DSL aspect of Ruby however is very powerful. Ruby is also a very well designed language. I think the best way for Ruby to succeed is to run well on top of JVM. This Way Ruby can take adavntage of modern VM and also enjoy all the libraries that are written for JVM. Reinventing a wheel and rewriting things in Ruby would be just a great waste of time and resources. This will also allow to overcome many Ruby today's shortcomings by "riding the Java wave".

Ruby being a great base for DSL - is only the area where it's really different from say Python. However as a final proof we need real applications of different kinds, web based and otherwise start showing up written in Ruby. May I suggest the attack plan for Ruby crowd: go after PHP segment of the market with RoR. Time will also tell about using weakly typed language in large projects, I don't necessarily think it's a problem, but would be nice to see it successfully done.

Great site for presentations and ideas on Ruby/DSL is Neil Ford's site http://www.nealford.com/

Creating Domain Specific Languages in Ruby Presentation. (Thanks Nicolas!)

http://onestepback.org/articles/lingo/index.html




Java's RoR?: Sprint+Hybernate+JSF-DSL ;-)