Ruby is just for generating web pages
8:40 PM EST Friday, March 10 2006
In a recent Java talk, James Gosling said: "PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems," he continued, "but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages."
I find this to be an interesting statement on many levels. First of all, it is yet another example of the fact that Ruby and Rails simply scares the crap of Java developers, for some unexplicable reason. As Paul Graham points out, whenever you say something that seems to attract a lot of negative criticism, you might be on to a revolutionary idea. There are many examples where even the mere suggestion that Ruby on Rails might be a more productive framework than Java/J2EE sparks a heated debate.
Secondly, James Gosling tries to trivialize web-based applications. Do you know how many Java/J2EE applications there are that "just generate web pages"? If Gosling is implying that Ruby generates web pages better than Java, I guess that means we can all stop using Tomcat/Resin/Jetty, Struts/Spring/WebWork and Hibernate, because Ruby, as a scripting language, is taking care of that "specialization".
And lastly, I think the use of the word scripting is very cafeully placed. Although I do admit that I'm not convinced Ruby can scale yet (but that is simply due to the fact that I haven't had an opportunity to research that claim myself, I have no opinion one way or the other yet), Gosling seems to be implying that scripted languages are somehow inferior by nature. But isn't Java really an interpreted language too? The JVM interprets the bytecode at runtime and executes it. Why is this inherently better than running a Ruby interpreter?
I would say that on the spectrum of Ruby Vs. Java, with James Gosling and all other Ruby haters on one end and Bruce Tate and all the other "Java is dead, long live Ruby"-ist on the other end, I am somewhere in the middle. I'm going to continue to research Ruby and Rails and see if there are situations where it makes more sense to use one or the other. One thing I can say is that learning Ruby on Rails has made me a better Java programmer. There are techniques used in Ruby and Rails that can be applied to Java and J2EE, which can make you more productive.
I found the same thing can happen with music. I took Guitar lessons in college, learner to play some scales and chords, read music, etc. I messed around on the Guitar occasions for a few years afterwards, not really getting any better. Then I started taking Piano lessons. I found after a while that when I picked up the Guitar again, I was a better Guitar player. Since Piano and Guitar are both instruments that play music, learning music from the aspect of another instrument made be a better musician, therefore a better guitar player.
The same can be said for Ruby and Rails. Java/J2EE and Ruby on Rails are both programming languages and frameworks for building web applications. Programming, specifically web application programming, is about processing HTTP requests, querying databases, parsing XML, etc. Learning another programming language and framework will only make you a better programmer, and therefore a better Java programmer.
