On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 09:41:15AM -0700, Justin Bailey wrote:
Two years ago I would have agreed with that statement. Now - no way. Make the compiler work for you. I've done a lot of Ruby development and I would never use it for a project of more than 3 or 4 people. It's an awesome language but I don't think it would scale to programming "in the large." Any object can be modified at any time. Determining where a particular method comes from can be an exercise in Sherlockian deduction. Give an organization of 100 developers that much freedom and I can only imagine chaos would result.
It looks from the outside like Ruby is going through some growing pains as a result of the excerise of "too much freedom" at the moment. But I wouldn't write Ruby off on account of that: an interesting article I read recently made the comparision with Emacs lisp which offers a similar level of power to the programmer, in that pretty much any function can be redefined at any point, and yet it has a thriving culture of Emacs extensions, all written by disparate people who manage not to step on each other's toes. IOW, it's a cultural issue as well as a language issue. Ruby programmers will no doubt develop their own culture of what is and isn't "allowed" in publically available extensions just as Emacs lisp programmers have. Phil -- http://www.kantaka.co.uk/ .oOo. public key: http://www.kantaka.co.uk/gpg.txt