I have been talking to a lot of interesting companies out west, and I had to laugh a little at one old fashioned large shop.
I overheard a conversation about how Ruby as a language would never work where they are since their projects are too large. They were discussing how the platform is too loose in that anyone can use the powerful meta protocols to rewrite methods on the fly and such.
Now, I kinda get it. There are some reasons why Java can make sense. Java code tends to be fairly readable across people, and it is very restrictive.
What had to make me laugh though was learning about their process for developing code. There were a million gatekeepers involved, scripts that run on code for style and other checks before it checks in etc.
If you have to develop a huge process around your engineering anyway, would it *really* be that different if you were writing some of these things in Ruby?
You would end up with probably a tenth of the code for these automated systems to scan :)
I have seen this again and again. I have heard of other banks that have actually dabbled in Rails for some of their apps and guess what. The world didn’t end.
This goes for other “scripting” languages too. I think there are a couple of lines of Python at Google for example.
