Nathan Lee

Fresh off a discussion with an old buddy of mine Nick: I reckon I could compile a list of IT project “success stories” that I personally have worked on that beat the list that the Ruby site has up.

I’d say just about every consultant worth their salt could better the list, so here’s my thoughts on how to improve it (my apologies to the Ruby fanboys who treat this thing as a religion, but I don’t think much of that either).

(For the non techies: ruby is a computer programming language. Have a read of my earlier post on Explaining IT geeks for normal people as background).

Let’s take a look at the more impressive sounding Ruby’s success stories shall we:

Ruby at NASA.. Well, kinda.

No, actually it’s not used for anything flight related, or real-time data feed processing (though java was) it’s used for simulations. Fair enough: that’s critical work indeed, but where is ruby used?

From: “Open source in the lab”

“we are using Ruby to create custom tools to support some of our XP [eXtreme Programming] practices like automated acceptance testing and unit testing. We have also managed to write a Fortran 95 mouth for Ruby’s awesome documentation tool, Rdoc, to provide automated API documentation. We also use Ruby for Fortran code generation, for conditional compilation, and as glue to combine various code elements into multidisciplinary combinations. We are evolving toward a goal of wrapping nearly all the Fortran bits with Ruby.”

Ok, so they’re using Ruby to generate Fortran 95 and some documentation. Fantastic.

Moving on. A research group in Motorola uses it.. No mention of what for or how it is used in the making of phones that run Java Mobile Edition. Note the singular “group”. In a place the size of motorola: if that’s all they have it’s nothing more than a curiosity. Like the following.

Next is Google sketchup supporting writing plugins as ruby. That’s not a bad use of ruby, something simple, something suitable for a scripting language.The application doesn’t appear to be written in Ruby though.

Onto the all important “business” section. The big one right – the “Enterprise” aspect of a programming platform. From the Ruby about page we get an idea of how Ruby measures its success:

Yep, how much they talk on a mailing list. Or the obscure TIOBE Software index, which measures how many google/youtube/whatever searches there are for something. Strong emphasis on talk being important. Kinda like my blog rants really, though the hot air to person ratio’s not bad with mine.

Anyhow, what’s there for business: toronto rehab tracking support calls. That’s useful work, doing good etc. I don’t really have anything too amusing to say, so I’ll just post a picture of my t-shirt that’s somewhat related.

Further down the page and the robotics project sounded like it was interesting and using Ruby in a bit more of a “hardcore core” application way. ODS also sounds like it is using Ruby for its core purpose too though the ODS stats have the sound of tumble weeds whistling by (but hey, I know that feeling with my oft neglected blog).

Things I’ve worked on that involve java/JEE

I’ll just pick out a few things (names changed to protect the innocent) that would make the list sound halfway decent that I’ve worked on.

• An accounting software firm’s sales reporting web portal and company intranet written in J2EE.
• Worldwide electronic retailer’s ordering/ERP partner integration.
• Australia wide Logistics company’s transport booking mechanism.
• Fortune 500 company’s Asia pacific order portal.
• Customisation of a hugely popular enterprise wiki and bug tracking system.
• UK Insurance core claims handling system.
• Investment bank’s trading system integration.

Those are just the ones I can remember working on that would sound impressive (particularly if names were attached, but I don’t consult and tell ).

A bit of a read of a book on making things memorable (e.g. Made to stick)

Hell, I even worked on a website with a teenage menstrual cycle calendar which would at least be a sticky example to put in the list.

Wait..  that came out wrong.

Moving on.

What Ruby needs to do

Surely they can throw out the request to their ever so chatty user base. Get someone somewhere who is willing to update their list with something other than fluff (I’ve been to plenty of sales meetings as a pre-sales consultant, so I know a bit about fluff detection). Stop wanking on about how elegant this particular “for loop” syntax is compared to another one that uses 3 extra characters and do a bit of marketing. If you care about that low level coding shit: you need to aim for grander things in your career perhaps something involving personal skills, or learn to use an IDE with code assist because that stuff not only doesn’t matter: it makes for harder to understand code.

Steer away from the “website was using ruby til it didn’t scale and then abandoned the codebase completely” examples. That means twitter. Not that you really want to tie yourself to that useless platform.

Remember “the right tool for the job” applies especially to scripting languages. We’re only now recovering from the fallout of years of people thinking VB was the one language to rule them all. Don’t plunge us into another dark age of indescipherable spaghetti code in a language never really meant to be the backbone of an enterprise. Not saying it can’t be done, but..

If you must, then try Yellowpages.com. It was one I found with some googling (Couldn’t actually visit it from here in Oz for some reason as it was offline as far as firefox and IE from my machine were concerned.. might be country filtering or something?). But that’s probably their one proper, high traffic, universally visible site running ruby. Why that wasn’t immediately jammed into the success stories I’m not sure. Perhaps the rehab clinic entry needs to get knocked down a notch.

I’m sure there’s some good news out there to be aggregated, polished and stuck on the website so that smug twits like myself can’t poke fun at it (from the high horse of my little blog).