Ruby, the End of the Honeymoon

At the risk of being threatened, ostracized or even lynched by an angry mob, I am boldly stating here that the Ruby movement is past its heyday.

"Why?", you rightly ask.

The signs were there all along. It started with the usual pioneering enthousiasm that comes with a new technology, and admittedly, I joined in the choir. Ruby, or more accurately, Ruby on Rails, sure played its part in upsetting the existing order, especially in the field of webclient development. The copy-cats soon followed, with Grails being the most honest about where it borrowed its idea from.

For some time now, I have noticed that quality Ruby people are hard to come by. For some time too, I noticed, that a number of Ruby pioneers start to lose interest and drift to other promising languages such as Scala, or even back into the fold of Java.

Ruby on Rails applications are slow. I have had the luxury to have a Ruby crack in my team who knows how to tune these little beasts and crack that whip. Grails applications, on the other hand, are not slow. They run directly on the JVM. An enviable position, that Ruby believers can only glare at without offering a solid alternative.

Aha, I hear you say, that's where JRuby, Ironruby and the likes come in. Now I would like you to heed this -- we are talking here about hand-crafted Ruby interpreters that make sure Ruby can be run on the JVM. Tools that have their own issues (we had a huge concurrency problem with an older JRuby version) and introduce one extra element of complexity into the Technology stack. Everything that people think up in the Ruby interpreter needs to be faithfully duplicated in JRuby, but then written up in Java. DRY? Not really. The notoriously sloppy documentation and audit trail that unfortunately appears to be a convention in the Ruby community only adds to the task. I have great respect for these brave developers, but less faith to build essential software on such a platform. And don't even get me started on how JRuby-hosted Ruby code is its own island (yes, you can ferry between the islands, but you will get seasick), contrary to Groovy and Scala applications which interact freely with Java code.

Finally, the commoditization of hosting web applications, especially by Google, pushes the knife home. Google's cheap hosting offer only allows you to run on the JVM, effectively adding a premium to your service if you want to run full-fledged Ruby on your own servers.

Ruby and Rails have brought a lot of good to software development, but alas, their time in the limelight has come to an end.