I’ll say your bias definitely shows here in the way you view “other technologies” as one big tribe that keeps chosing a new king. Let’s get some real data here so we have a point of reference, here is O’Reilly’s analysis of all programming languages’ popularity, based on their book sales.

Hmmmmm!

Problem 1) How many of the developers know Ruby well enough to use it in a corporate environment?

You can find really 2 types of devs in a company, the self taught (usually VB) and the college edgu-ma-cated, (usually c#) - NOTE: This is limited to the companies I’ve worked for, and most of my friends have. I have not worked in a corporation where this is not the norm. In these places there is already a bias between the 2 types of devs - of which the C# guys are right Their bias usually runs along the lines that when devs learn stuff on their own, they don’t learn the proper ways of doing things. And usually, when they take the time to learn new things, it’s related to what they already know.

In my case, I learn the new Microsoft technologies, because that is what I am used to. And I’m biased that way. I’m comfortable with it, and I know how to use it properly. Put a bunch of me in a company, and Ruby will never get mentioned.

Problem 2) Who makes the decisions for technology.

Again, in the corporate world, it hard to convince anybody to scrap all the Microsoft licenses, or all the Delphi code, and rewrite everything in a new language. I worked at a company where I wanted to rewrite some Cobol code in C. The response was something about not putting my faith in fly by night technologies.

I’ve also worked at a place where a decision on the technology was based on the tech guy on the board who was well past his prime, but like a demo he saw from a friends company. Now, if it had been a demo on ruby, I think problem 3 would arise.

Problem 3) Dinosaurs

It took some companies a llllloooooonnnnnngggggg time to get rid of their cobol programmers at a rate where they could be retrained/replaced by newer technologies without losing their knowledge base. If management were to come to me today and say I was going to be trained in Ruby for all future development, I’d say, well, I’m not sure. I’d probably be ok with it, but not everyone is. Many .NET developers would just pack up and get another job. It’s easier to do that then work with something new sometimes.

Problem 4) 2 types of code to support.

So we are going to use Ruby going forward, and keep the legacy where it is. Well, this has it’s own issues, but isn’t necessarily that big of a problem.

With the above 4 problems I personally see, and could probably think of a few more if I really tried, I think even if Ruby was “ready for the enterprise”, it would be hard to bring into the enterprise where Microsoft is the norm, which is the majority of web 1.0.

For web 2.0 and 3.0, I think it just needs to succeed somewhere visibly. And not just in a community site, but in a large corporate site.

blah-blah-blah-blah: I could go on and on, but I’ll end with a question. C, C++, C# (ASP and ASP.net as well) have been around a long time, and evolve somewhat to be more like other technologies. (Notice I didn’t mention Java, I recently read Java was now officially dead thanks to Ruby, so I don’t have to talk about it anymore)

Why is it that these languages evolve, and every so many years, the free stuff: java, perl, ruby, php, etc, get to a certain point and seem to be replaced? To corporate types anyway, this is how it looks.

“The more fanbois in a language, the faster it will be adopted.”

Seems like it should be:

“The more smart people who get things done in, and are passionate about, a language, the faster it will be adopted.”

But i’m just trolling, mostly.

I like your point about your Python programmer, though. Marty and I were just discussing about Google’s AppEngine on our podcast. I was like “Why did they pick Python Django first? Surely that’s like number 5 or worse of the most popular web dev frameworks, does this make any sense if they’re trying to take a market?”

Marty’s like “Yeah, well Guido Van Rossum, the creator of Python, is heading up the AppEngine team, so…”

Right!

I really like Python a lot, though.

The Ruby fanboi to Ruby programmer ratio seems pretty high, so it is probably just a matter of time. Time, and sweet sweet marketing.