It is time to stop listening to James Gosling
It seems that Sun is using James Gosling to spread FUD regarding any technology that competes with Java. He created Java, and he is a techie and techies have high standards and are always honest - right?
He came out slinging against Harmony a year ago, and now he is at it again with Ruby and PHP:
PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems, but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems.
He is either grossly misinformed or he is making things up. Either way it is time to stop listening. Too bad.
(Via Loud Thinking.)
March 11th, 2006 at 19:43
“He created Java, and he is a techie and techies have high standards and are always honest - right?” Read blogs about Ruby and rails, groovy and netbeans? Are they always honest? Nope, their tech is always the best no matter if it really is or not.
I guess it is time to stop listening to all people who are passionate about something.
March 11th, 2006 at 20:12
I’m sure you’ll assume I’m biased, but I don’t think he’s WRONG per se. He’s also not RIGHT either. Meaning I have yet to see a LARGE SCALE application written in Ruby (PHP is another story, but it has issues of scale with regards to session/db that are more about the API than the tech). There is a good chance that Ruby would scale, but there is an equally good chance that the performance of an interpretted language would be under one’s expectations. moreover, while I’m truly impressed so far by Ruby the language, I’m truly underwhelmed by its runtime environment. Presently it takes us back to the same pain that Java minimized with regards to native library installations and conflicts. Sure you have Jar-hell but that can be mitigated decently. The ruby version of this is much worse when you deal with multiple apps running in multiple threads often in the same process (again highly scalable) using different versions of the same native dependency. Credit where credit is due. Ruby has a more pleasant syntax and is less verbose of a language. Java has a superior runtime environment. This isn’t to say it will always be that way but thats what it appears to me now. So he’s not WRONG, but he’s not proven RIGHT either.
March 12th, 2006 at 6:09
Two points:
First, reported speech (especially by Sys-Con) never fairly represents the tone and rhetorical approach of the event being presented. Cut the guy some slack, it’s not like it’s his blog entry.
Second, there’s no conspiracy. James speaks for himself just like I do. An abstract “Sun” is not spreading abstract “FUD”. Rather, someone has an opinion. You don’t like the opinion, but that doesn’t make it the subversive work of an evil corporation.
March 12th, 2006 at 19:56
What’s wrong with his assertion? How many high-end systems are written in Ruby on Rails? How many SOA architectures are developed using PHP? It’s not FUD: it’s just facts.
August 6th, 2006 at 0:42
Perhaps this is why Ruby is not ready for high traffic websites: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=ruby&lang2=java
Ruby is an expressive (dare I say beautiful?) “object scripting” language, but sadly its current implementation seems to be very slow. Python would be a much better bet for production at the moment as it beats Perl and PHP in performance terms.
I’d prefer to run these languages on the established Java VM. Gems/pear/cpan and their nasty C native compilations and bridging libraries would then not be necessary. All that library code already exists for Java.