I’m getting ready to start a new project using Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3.x. that will give me some good info to use in updating this old article on RoR pros and cons.
In the meantime, I just wanted to take a moment to summarize my current thoughts on the Ruby+POSIX vs. .NET+Microsoft stacks, having spent the last several years jumping back and forth between the two ecosystems.
Core dump:
- Visual Studio is extremely powerful. Their debugger is heads and shoulders above gdb, rdb, and pretty much any other *db on the planet.
- Static typing and compiled code is a nice security blanket when it comes to typos and refactoring. Yes, I’m addicted.
- Every Microsoft event I’ve been to in the last several years has felt stiff and enterprisey. The ecosystem is definitely headed more towards the world of IBM and Oracle, and farther away from the world of Apple and Google.
- The higher the suits/t-shirts ratio, the less fun and interesting things get. Microsoft isn’t fun anymore.
- On the other hand, the open-source/POSIX community is becoming more fun and interesting all the time. The community is vibrant, inventive, and supportive. They are more interested in the joy of the craft than in making a buck (although they do that too).
- The RoR community has grown up a lot in the past few years. We now have lots of lessons-learned and best practices to reference.
- CodePlex and NuGet are steps in the right direction, but aren’t really changing the wider Microsoft culture.
- MongoDB? Awesome. Linux? Awesome. Nginx? Awesome. Ruby 1.9? Awesome. Vim? Debatable.
- With the advent of Ruby 1.9, performance is now good enough. Character encoding woes are a thing of the past. The only thing I miss is my compiled-code security blanket. On the other hand, RSpec and Cucumber give me warm fuzzies.
- It’s a real shame that Python seems to be winning the mindshare war over Ruby. In my own experience and not-so-humble-opinion, Ruby is far more elegant, and package management is better. Python feels like a strange marriage of PHP and Ruby. The only thing that tempts me about Python is it’s speed (esp. PyPy), but recent releases of Ruby are fast enough for my needs.
Bottom line: The better performance and IDE are no longer as compelling an argument to stick with the .NET stack.
But wait! There’s hope! Nancy, Mono, Owin, etc. provide evidence that the .NET community is taking matters into their own hands. Stay tuned…
