Blogs

Each year O’Reilly publishes on their blog a State of the Computer Book Market analysis. It is an excellent indicator of computer programming language trends. Geeks love their books and programming geeks adorn their desks with as many reference books as possible. Despite living in a hyper connected world we cannot risk even one moment without access to the more obscure and arcane intricacies of our chosen languages and toolsets.

And Ruby is cleaning up: officially recognized as a “Mid-Major Programming Language”. And in good company too with Visual Basic and ActionScript.

Perhaps its the growing body of knowledge or perhaps its just the beauty and simplicity of the language itself. Probably a little bit of both. Its nice to see such a fun and rewarding environment growing into the hearts of the mainstream. We love Ruby here at Nitobi and we have grown a good number of Ruby projects and expertise. With Java and, soon, .NET support we’re looking forward to bringing Ruby to even more places. And adding more books to our shelves!

Or, something cool like that anyhow.

I resisted the urge to comment on this but so many opinions are floating around and most of them are fucking stupid so I had to comment.

Zed’s rant means nothing to the technology of Ruby or Rails. His rant was about people he had taken issue with. Thats it. I’m reading absolutely retarded ’sky is falling’ responses about failure of the technology. There was no failure of technology. This rant was the product of failed communication. I don’t agree with the opinions or the approach but I sure found it funny. Zed is an excellent flame writer and should probably awarded a medal for best troll ever written in the history of the internets.

I’m reading posts all over the place that are using Zed’s rant as a rally against the technology of Ruby and that is bullshit. Zed predicted that technology will change. Here, read that again: Zed predicted that technology will change.. No shit it will. Of course better solutions are going to emerge and evolve. It doesn’t mean the technology isn’t valid today.

I agree with Tim Bray and Dion Almaer. Rails is a solid technology appropriate for some scenarios but not all. Use it or don’t. Thats it. Calm down. Take a breath. Read the rant for the humor it is intended to be.

Lastly, if you are a programmer, take this rant as opportunity to teach yourself some Python or Scala or Erlang or even Ruby. Then you can draw your own, intelligent, rational and possibly objective arguments for or against a technology.