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comp.lang.ruby

Re: On Enterprise Ruby

Alex Young

3/27/2007 10:48:00 AM

Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:
> I want to ask one more question: why is the E-word anathema in this
> community? Yes, people choose fancy words for self-description. Yes, these
> words can become associated with bad things. And yes, staying away from the
> whole thing is a possible lifestyle choice. Changing the game is another
> equally valid choice, however. So, who or what are we, as a community,
> sending those "$&#* off!" signals to?
The problem with the term "enterprise" is that it doesn't seem to have a
clear, consistent definition as applied to software (or, indeed, to
anything else), which, in a software-centric community, makes it pretty
worthless as a description. As a result, it's not used within the
community, and (speaking from my own point of view) we hear it from
outside the community most often as "Ruby isn't ready for the
enterprise," or "Ruby needs to support buzzword-feature-X to be taken
seriously in the enterprise," so it's quite natural that a negative
connotation should be attached - especially when those criticisms are
unjustified.

Give us a rational, testable definition of "enterprise," and I think
you'll find, negative connotations notwithstanding (and boy, do I love
the term "enterprisey"), that the test will be passed without complaint.
It's just the utterly nebulous terminology (and the woolly thinking
that often seems to accompany it) which gets peoples' backs up.

I see this as quite orthogonal to the "enterprise -> bloatware"
association, although that may well play a part, however justified or
unjustified it is.

All strictly IMHO, of course.

--
Alex
46 Answers

dave rose

3/27/2007 12:33:00 PM

0

As soon as i see a want-ad in Cleveland,Ohio for a rails or ruby
programmer then
and only then will i call ruby 'mainstream'ed enough for even becoming
R2EE.
The biggest thing that is working against ruby now in corporate american
is the
not invented here syndrome..my boss still thinks that i'm only one of
three
people in the US that knows Ruby
As a result, it's not used within the
> community, and (speaking from my own point of view) we hear it from
> outside the community most often as "Ruby isn't ready for the
> enterprise," or "Ruby needs to support buzzword-feature-X to be taken
> seriously in the enterprise," so it's quite natural that a negative



--
Posted via http://www.ruby-....

Tomas Pospisek

3/27/2007 12:44:00 PM

0

Richard Conroy

3/27/2007 12:46:00 PM

0

On 3/27/07, Dave Rose <bitdoger2@yahoo.com> wrote:
> As soon as i see a want-ad in Cleveland,Ohio for a rails or ruby
> programmer then
> and only then will i call ruby 'mainstream'ed enough for even becoming
> R2EE.
> The biggest thing that is working against ruby now in corporate american
> is the
> not invented here syndrome..my boss still thinks that i'm only one of
> three
> people in the US that knows Ruby

Yeah, here in Ireland, the Team Lead asked if Ruby is so big, why aren't
we seeing it on job applications (for a Snr Java job). As if this implied
some universal truth. There was lots of bottom shelf answers I could
have used (it was a stupid comment) but what I said was:
"They are all gone to Google or contracting"

Having any significant experience with Ruby will change your perspective
on programming. 'Any old Java job' will cease to have any meaningful
attraction in a technical sense.

Alex Young

3/27/2007 1:26:00 PM

0

Tomas Pospisek's Mailing Lists wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Mar 2007, Alex Young wrote:
>
>> Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:
>>> I want to ask one more question: why is the E-word anathema in this
>>> community? Yes, people choose fancy words for self-description. Yes,
>>> these
>>> words can become associated with bad things. And yes, staying away
>>> from the
>>> whole thing is a possible lifestyle choice. Changing the game is another
>>> equally valid choice, however. So, who or what are we, as a community,
>>> sending those "$&#* off!" signals to?
>>
>> The problem with the term "enterprise" is that it doesn't seem to have
>> a clear, consistent definition as applied to software (or, indeed, to
>> anything else), which, in a software-centric community, makes it
>> pretty worthless as a description.
>
> Um well, it's about as clear the expression "software that doesn't
> suck", which is intuitively understandable by anybody doing software I
> guess.
Maybe to you. Not to me. I've seen "enterprise" used with any/all of
the following connotations, among others:

- Integrating across system boundaries (your definition)
- Encompassing all business processes internally
- Used in a business environment
- Hot-deployable from a single central source across a network
- Having live failover capabilities
- Having good static analysis tools
- [3,4,5] 9's uptime

All of these are completely different, and refer to wildly disparate
aspects of development, deployment and use.

This is my point, in a roundabout sort of way - while it's very easy to
pick on any one of these and say "because Ruby doesn't meet this
particular requirement out of the box, it's not worth looking at any
further," that's to ignore the successes that people are having with
Ruby in otherwise traditional environments, as alluded to by the OP.

<snip>
> Starting from the above definition and from my experience, enterprise
> means integrating accross system boundaries, and integrating means SOAP
> and XML (I am not arguing here that it can't be done differently). And
> SOAP and XML is where Ruby is not shining. Thus as a colorary "Ruby is
> not enterprise ready" as you say.
Is that definition widely accepted? Is that what the term "enterprise"
means in the expression "enterprise Ruby stack?" That's a honest
question - it's not how I read it, but I'd like to hear your point of view.

--
Alex

Alex Young

3/27/2007 2:12:00 PM

0

Jason Roelofs wrote:
> So yeah, no more of this "Ruby isn't ready" crap, because it is. And
> please,
> stop using the word "enterprise". It may have started off good, but scores
> and scores of bad code has tarnished the word.

A corollary to my other points: every time someone uses the word
"enterprise," there is almost certainly a better, more specific word for
what they actually mean. A corollary to my corollary: almost every time
someone uses the word "enterprise" they are misunderstood, because the
listener assumes a larger subset of "enterprise" than the speaker intends.

--
Alex

Brian Ehmann

3/27/2007 2:20:00 PM

0


On Mar 27, 2007, at 8:45 AM, Richard Conroy wrote:

> On 3/27/07, Dave Rose <bitdoger2@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> As soon as i see a want-ad in Cleveland,Ohio for a rails or ruby
>> programmer then
>> and only then will i call ruby 'mainstream'ed enough for even
>> becoming
>> R2EE.
>> The biggest thing that is working against ruby now in corporate
>> american
>> is the
>> not invented here syndrome..my boss still thinks that i'm only one of
>> three
>> people in the US that knows Ruby
>
> Yeah, here in Ireland, the Team Lead asked if Ruby is so big, why
> aren't
> we seeing it on job applications (for a Snr Java job). As if this
> implied
> some universal truth. There was lots of bottom shelf answers I could
> have used (it was a stupid comment) but what I said was:
> "They are all gone to Google or contracting"
>
> Having any significant experience with Ruby will change your
> perspective
> on programming. 'Any old Java job' will cease to have any meaningful
> attraction in a technical sense.
>

Agreed, Ruby has ruined my Sr. Java Engineer job. I can't tell you how
many times I have thought, "Damn, this would look/work so much better if
I could use Ruby."

Richard Conroy

3/27/2007 3:42:00 PM

0

On 3/27/07, Alex Young <alex@blackkettle.org> wrote:
> All of these are completely different, and refer to wildly disparate
> aspects of development, deployment and use.
>
> This is my point, in a roundabout sort of way - while it's very easy to
> pick on any one of these and say "because Ruby doesn't meet this
> particular requirement out of the box, it's not worth looking at any
> further," that's to ignore the successes that people are having with
> Ruby in otherwise traditional environments, as alluded to by the OP.

You have also hit on another anti-Ruby point - that Ruby should be
able to fully replace Java/C/.Net i.e. it is a requirement for enterprisey
Ruby.

Nobody considers that you can mix and match technology - that
you could get a simple web app interface to whatever working with
Rails or Camping on top of your big Java or .NET application
server.

Its certainly not Sun, IBM or Microsoft that are getting upset that
you want to program the agile ends of your app in Ruby. You
want to run your Rails apps on top of Glassfish and avail of
5/6/7 nines uptime and global transactions? Now you can.

Tomas Pospisek

3/27/2007 4:00:00 PM

0

Alex Young

3/27/2007 4:06:00 PM

0

Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:
> On 3/27/07, Alex Young <alex@blackkettle.org> wrote:
>>
>> Give us a rational, testable definition of "enterprise,"
>
>
> Whenever someone says "not ready for the enterprise", the E-word usually
> stands for "large companies whose core business is not software".
>
> These places typically have post-technical managers in charge of strategic
> IT decisions, lots of money to throw at IT problems (much more than a Web
> 2.0 startup), and a zoo of systems and applications, spanning the last 25
> years of the history of computing. Some of those applications need to share
> data and otherwise cooperate.
>
> Rational enough? :)
Sure :-)

Defined like that, the statement "Ruby isn't ready for the enterprise"
is just as easily reversed - "this enterprise isn't ready for Ruby." I
say this because there certainly are enterprises using Ruby, and using
it well, now - you're actually in a better position than me to know the
truth of this.

--
Alex

Gregory Seidman

3/27/2007 5:32:00 PM

0

On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 01:06:20AM +0900, Alex Young wrote:
> Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:
[...]
> >Whenever someone says "not ready for the enterprise", the E-word usually
> >stands for "large companies whose core business is not software".
> >
> >These places typically have post-technical managers in charge of strategic
> >IT decisions, lots of money to throw at IT problems (much more than a Web
> >2.0 startup), and a zoo of systems and applications, spanning the last 25
> >years of the history of computing. Some of those applications need to share
> >data and otherwise cooperate.
[...]
> Defined like that, the statement "Ruby isn't ready for the enterprise"
> is just as easily reversed - "this enterprise isn't ready for Ruby." I
> say this because there certainly are enterprises using Ruby, and using
> it well, now - you're actually in a better position than me to know the
> truth of this.

Of Ruby and "the enterprise," which do you suppose is Mohammed and which is
the mountain? Thinking in terms of enterprises needing to wise up and take
advantage of what Ruby/Rails has to offer for their own good is at best
altruistic and at worst self-delusional. There is an advantage to us, the
early adopters (where early is defined here as before it got enterprise
attention), hobbyists, and such, if we can get enterprises (i.e. the "large
companies whose core business is not software" mentioned above) to use
Ruby/Rails to a significant extent. That advantage is a wider range of
profit opportunities with greater job security.

I actually wrote a lot more after that paragraph, but it wound up being
just a tangent. Ultimately, it is in our best interests to bring Ruby to
the enterprise, and to do so actively rather than allowing someone who has
*their* best interests in mind do it for us. Rest assured, there will be a
variety of attempts to make Ruby acceptable to the enterprise, and some of
them probably won't smell too good. Passively hoping it won't happen or
hoping that someone else will get it right is the best way to let it go
wrong.

> Alex
--Greg