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Re: [PhillyOnRails] Fwd: Objective-C title from established author...
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Aaron,
Concerning your "match up" question below, imagine
that you are Grace Hopper, and the year is 1963 or so,
and
somebody asks you in the Department of the Navy,
"well, Hopper, now that you've invented COBOL, how
well do
you think that it lines up with our daily work around
here?"
What would Grace Hopper have answered?
How many programmers are sitting at cubicles across
the U.S. today
maintaining business software written in COBOL on MVS.
Ten thousand? Twenty thousand?
How many lines of COBOL on MVS are out there,
requiring bug fixes,
maintenance, and business logic enhancements?
What percentage of those COBOL programmers tell their
bosses, "I'd love to fix your bug, or add these
enhancements the business unit has requested, but
COBOL is dead, so I won't do that anymore."
I suppose my point is, whatever gets written and
deployed in Ruby or RoR, you can bet that 40 years
from now, someone is going to have to fix bugs in it,
maintain it, and keep it running.
Particularly true with the number of failed conversion
projects that are out there. I've heard something
like 70% of projects undertaken fail to meet initial
objectives due to missed requirements, etc.
This means non-IT business people who control the
purse strings are far less likely to depart from using
old systems and software, and try something new.
On another controversial subject, I don't believe that
there will always be more data to gobble up hardware
capability. Soon, it won't matter whether your
language of choice is compiled or interpreted. What
will matter most is whether or not other people can
read and maintain code that is written, and whether or
not people enjoy writing it. In both these respects,
I see a long future for Ruby and RoR.
The Philadelphia Phillies are in Kansas City to take
on the Royals this weekend at the "K" (Kaufmann
Stadium). When Kaufmann started his pharmaceutical
company , Marion Laboratories, he was producing in a
laboratory the size of his home basement. A small
start for Ruby and Rails says nothing about where it
will be in twenty years.
Time will tell.
--- Aaron Blohowiak <aaron@aaronblohowiak.com> wrote:
> > After 20 years, the only editor I still use is
> Bill
> > Joy's "vi"
>
> > What does this tell us about the lasting
> value...to professional
> > developers?
>
> They have yet to try Textmate.
>
>
> > Aaron, you also might want to tell EBay and Bank
> of
> > America (jsp for
> > online banking nationwide) that Java is dead.
>
> people still use eBay? CL on rails!
>
> > I
> > suppose its only a matter of time until somebody
> > rewrites EBay's site in a Ruby or RoR derivative,
> and
> > the same for the Java Server Pages on many web
> sites.
> >
> > Time will tell:-)
>
>
> In all seriousness, as someone who has been around
> the proverbial
> block, how does rails match up in the daily in and
> out of your work?
>
>
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