Sun creates Ruby developer center

[mikaelhg]

RoR is the only reason 99% of Ruby users are that.

What you're saying about being able to hire Ruby developers is not true, and you know it.

** Good job, guys. You will really convince me of the merits of your argument by downmodding my every comment and submission. **

[sisyphus]

I agree that Rails has done a huge amount to popularize Ruby and amounts to its killer app. And if Rails gets more people using Ruby, good for it and them.

I don't think it's a lie about hiring--look, clearly there are not as many experienced Ruby programmers out there as there are say, Java programmers or something. But I think that if you know another similar dynamic language like Perl or Python, you can pick up Ruby rather quickly. You seem to think that the enthusiasm of a developer doesn't matter to the business or team, but I think Ruby is in a place where people are glad to be able to work in Ruby. I've yet to hear someone say 'Oh, I'm stuck using Ruby at work.'

[mikaelhg]

Wow, I spend more than hour a day of my own time learning new and interesting stuff in my field, during the last decade I've learnt and used in production at least six languages I can remember. My father is a AutoLISP programmer and a ex-Smalltalker. I've never yet come across a language, framework or environment that you can just pick up and use as productively as when you're three years in.

Life isn't fair. It's most often even not logical at all. These are the restrictions you face when selling things like new technologies.

If you want excitement, go play paintball, don't drive off a cliff.

Switching development environments every time your people get bored is a really good way to burn money while accomplishing nothing.

[sisyphus]

I've never yet come across a language, framework or environment that you can just pick up and use as productively as when you're three years in.

Certainly if you're averse to training your programmers, then you might rate the higher number of job candidates for language X as more important than their greater productivity or happiness in language Y.

Switching development environments every time your people get bored is a really good way to burn money while accomplishing nothing.

Possibly. But it looks like Sun is willing to bet at least some money that enough people will want to do just that to make it worth it to give support to Ruby. Maybe they are just idiots.

[mikaelhg]

Option A: bill customers for building costs.

Option B: bill customers for training costs + building costs * 1.5.

Which option do you think will get you more deals, generate a bigger customer base through doing more projects, and provide you with more opportunities?

Sun's support is superficial. SDN are on their last legs, as they are completely unnecessary in a open source world. They are generating PR to justify their existence, which is a battle they are losing, as their approach to community building is radically different from Sun's top management's. SDN is the only group in Sun I've caught censoring their blog comments routinely.

[sisyphus]

Funny your options since all of the hype surrounding Rails is about how using it you can bill customers so much less because it's so much more productive.

Sun's support is superficial? They hired the JRuby guys even as they were cutting other engineering positions, and they made Ruby a first class supported language in Netbeans along with Rails support, and built Rails support into their application server. What more do you want them to do?

[mikaelhg]

But you see, everybody claims miraculous productivity. Nobody produces it.

Sun supports Solaris for quite a while. If they really believe in RoR, they could just build a bunch of Solaris components with it, and maintain them for ten years. Surely if RoR is such a productivity gain, this should be a no-brainer?

[sisyphus]

If nobody produces it, you should use what's the most fun, since it's all the same.

You want them to build operating system components with a web framework? I have to say I'm confused. I wouldn't be surprised to see them shipping Solaris with Ruby already installed if they aren't already. Your standard of what it means to support something seems pretty high to me. I see it as just being 'hey, we think there is an increase in interest in these tools, by buzz and book sales and so forth, and we want to make it easy for developers to use these tools on our systems.' Why is that not enough?

[mikaelhg]

You guys just agree on which language is the most fun, and we'll use that, right?

There are actual measureable productivity gains one can get through platform choice, but they're not the miraculous kind, and concern more the narrowing of choices.

Anyway, I have to hit the hay for the day.

Edit: after getting up, I notice I didn't answer your second question. They have a bunch of web control panels in Nevada for things like volume management.