Ruby’s Biggest Challenge for 2009

According to the TIOBE index, Ruby is holding its own in the 11th position, sandwiched between Delphi and D. Meanwhile, its “cousin” Python has jumped up in rank and is currently the 6th most popular programming language in the world, beating out C#, JavaScript and Perl. Ruby’s exponential growth appears to have truly slowed down. Even if we disregard the TIOBE Index or view it as being entirely inaccurate, there are other factors that indicate a lull in Ruby’s popularity. For example, at the end of 2005, thanks to Rails, Ruby book sales surpassed Python and were up by a hefty 1552%. Yet, according to this post on the O’Reilly radar, Ruby was the language with the biggest decline in unit sales during 2008, dropping out of the top 10 languages and moving from a 5.39% market share in 2007 to just 3.51% in 2008.

So is this decline in interest for the language, Ruby’s biggest challenge to overcome in 2009? I don’t believe so. I’d venture to guess that most developers have heard of Ruby by now, and I think it’s fair to say that as a community, we’ve attracted a lot of attention towards Ruby over the past few years. The Ruby word is clearly out. As Ruby moves forward, organic growth is expected and the numbers above shouldn’t scare you in the least.

Ruby’s challenge for 2009 is not about adoption, marketing or – to adapt a term from the Christian vernacular – trying to convince other developers to accept Ruby into their hearts. The real challenge will be technical, namely moving away from the main Ruby 1.8 interpreter.

Historically, Ruby has been an exceptionally well designed programming language with a very lousy implementation. Some of the main issues surrounding MRI are common knowledge: memory hungry when compared to other scripting languages, extremely slow, lack of native threads, and lack of support for Unicode.

Ruby 1.9.1 resolves these issues though. As such, we as a community should really make an effort to get rid of our MRI baggage and move forward as quickly as possible to embrace Ruby 1.9.x. The payoff is an improved language with a faster and “less memory intensive” VM, as well as native threads (albeit with GIL) and support for multi-byte strings. There’s no reason to look at the past. A stable version is available and we should all be using it.

In practice, very few people have switched to Ruby 1.9. Some developers wrongly believe that Ruby 1.9 is just one intermediary step to Ruby 2.0, and as such it’s not meant to be used in production. Better communication could have avoided this common misconception. More importantly though, developers are not using Ruby 1.9 because there are very few libraries that work with it.

The Rails team is a notable exception, having placed a lot of effort into a release (2.3) that works completely with Ruby 1.9.1. But most libraries, gems and plugins won’t work with it, so inevitably Rails on Ruby 1.9.1 loses a lot of its initial appeal.

Unlike in the Python community where Python 3 is seen as an improvement to the language (Python 2.5/2.6 are perfectly fine for the time being) the Ruby community doesn’t have this sort of “luxury”. We finally have the chance to eliminate the root causes behind the harsh criticism that Ruby is sometimes subjected to, and to have a good implementation at our disposal. All we have to do is make a swift switch to Ruby 1.9.

To achieve this worthy goal I urge project owners to report compatibility with Ruby 1.9.1 information in their README files. I realize that this is open source and that doing so is a voluntary effort, but I truly think that Ruby 1.9.1 should be seen as a priority by the community as a collective whole. If you are not a project owner, you can still help by testing active libraries with Ruby 1.9.1 and informing the author of the library you test of your findings. Those who are able to, could also submit a patch that would enable those projects to work with the latest version of Ruby.

In truth, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep a list, perhaps within a wiki, of projects that have already been ported to Ruby 1.9 and that have been tested/confirmed as working. This switch to Ruby 1.9.1 can also act as a reset button when it comes to getting rid of many of the old, unmaintained, half-assed attempts from N years ago. Porting to Ruby 1.9.1 could act as a rough, implicit line of distinction between active and inactive projects.

I don’t know if this is an open letter to the Ruby community per se, but you could view it as such, as I feel that the topic of switching to Ruby 1.9.1 is one of vital importance for us Rubyists. If you agree with this point and assessment of the situation, please consider spreading the word, sharing your thoughts, and linking to this post.

When new developers come to the Ruby world, lets greet them with Ruby 1.9.x. In the long term, doing so will improve our growth as a community more than any marketing effort ever could (and the two efforts are not mutually exclusive either). Ultimately, Ruby’s biggest challenge may just be our greatest opportunity to improve.

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34 Comments

  1. Carlo Pecchia March 23, 2009
  2. Antonio Cangiano March 23, 2009
  3. Carlo Pecchia March 23, 2009
  4. Softmind March 23, 2009
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  26. Pingback: EnquĂŞte Rails « Ruby and Rails March 25, 2009
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