Martin Fowler on Ruby

Posted by Daniel Butler Thu, 11 May 2006 16:59:00 GMT

Martin Fowler, well known in the OO, Patterns, and Agile world, has written a short article about whether Ruby is ready for the mainstream yet, and whether you should be considering it for your projects. He writes,

It’s still early days yet, but I now have a handful of project experiences to draw on. So far the results are firmly in favor of Ruby. When I ask the question “do you think you’re significantly more productive in Ruby rather than Java/c#”, each time I’ve got a strong ‘yes’. This is enough for me to start saying that for a suitable project, you should give Ruby a spin. Which, of course, only leaves open the small question of what counts as ‘suitable’.

Read on for some personal thoughts on Ruby and Ruby on Rails, as well as some bonus graphs from Google Trends.

My opinion of Ruby and Ruby on Rails is that any developer should try it on a project or two, and even if you don’t stick with Ruby, you’ll have gained the following:

Ruby on Rails is successfully changing the world of web application development even as more traditional applications are moving to the web. Knowledge of Ruby and Rails will help you better
With Ruby, you’ll better comprehend the difference between the “accidental difficulties” of software development and the “essential difficulties”. Ruby on Rails lets you focus on what’s essential, without wasting too much time worrying or dealing with the accidental. For more on those differences, be sure to read Frederick Brook’s quintessential paper, No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents in Software Engineering.
Having worked in Ruby, you be more painfully aware of the types of coding activities that are merely busy work–generating XML configuration files for O-R mapping, for instance, and you’ll probably end up writing helper scripts that let you automatically generate and maintain those files.
Because many new frameworks in Java, PHP, Python, Perl, and .NET are more-or-less sucessful attempts to replicate the Ruby on Rails framework, having Ruby experience enables you to critically evaluate how successful and productive each new framework is.

But a word of caution: once you go red, you may never go back…

Now, as far as Ruby on Rails popularity goes, please examine the following graphs, representing the absolute growth in popularity over the past year and a half.

2005 Ruby on Rails - Google Search Volume - 2005