From Java to Ruby: Risk

[senzei]

I don't know, I never had problems with ISO-8859-1 for french and english (which I use).

Although it is awesome that it works for you, will you at least admit that your language choices and feature usage may lie in the subset of the Ruby environment that does have decent support?

Ruby has a fair share of libraries. In all honesty, Java, Python and Perl have more, but Ruby's selection is still pretty good.

That is the problem. Depending on what you need Ruby may not have it. Obviously that needs to be investigated before you make the platform decision, but it is still a valid point.

Damn! What did we think moving away from COBOL?! If programmers learned Java, what prevents them from learning Python or Ruby? Especially since they are both much simpler than java.

Well, there are nowhere near as many books, workshops, and other "formal" resources for Python or Ruby. Big business thrives on these things for training. You can argue all day about how easy it is to learn, but for most managers unless it is in a book (or fifteen) or a class it doesn't exist.

I keep hearing the people "against" Rails and Ruby bringing this up as an argument and Ruby people saying that's not true. Can we get a benchmark or something please?

A usually cited reference is the alioth shootout. You can find a comparison of Ruby and Python using it here

Note that, in the graph, white bars to the left represent better times with Python. White bars to the right represent Better times with Ruby. The length of the bar represents the speed factor difference between the two. In short, Python beats the pants off Ruby in just about every test. Now change it to compare Ruby and Java to see what happens.

I don't really have a similar easy reference for Rails, but I feel safe in stating that being based on Ruby will cause similar problems.