I agree with the Rails-centrism issue. Even alternative web frameworks have a hard time in the Ruby world.
I disagree with the assumption that Ruby is web only. E.g. Chef and Puppet are huge efforts that have no direct connection to frontend web, both written in Ruby. Vagrant as well. Ruby is big in the infrastructure world.
It is funny to ready Ruby guys complaining of the lack of web frameworks alternatives. Python community likes to complain that they have too much web frameworks. Nobody is ever satisfied :-)
Re:Introducing Rubinius X
by marcocampos on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @03:11PM
(#6555631)
What about game framework, computer vision, scientific computing, robotics, etc? I'm sure you can come up with examples for each of these but most are either dormant/abandoned or simply non-existant. As for infrastructure, yes Chef and Puppet are big in the startup world but I know a lot more companies using Python or Java for that.
Companies use Java instead of Puppet? How does the conversation go where you even start to compare those two things?
Re:Introducing Rubinius X
by empthought on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @11:00PM
(#6557788)
"Hey do we have $X million for Opsware?"
"Sure thing."
"Damn it feels good to be a banker."
For robotics, see Artoo: http://artoo.io/
Does it help that I know far more companies using Chef and Puppet for that then Python and Java?
Re:Introducing Rubinius X
by empthought on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @10:59PM
(#6557784)
Depends, do they have a fraction of the IT staff that Tivoli and Opsware users have? I'm guessing not.
I usually work for DAX companies. Yes.
My point was that your personal sample is most probably irrelevant.
I've been doing some robotics stuff using my arduino and ruby via the dino gem (https://github.com/austinbv/dino)
Re:Introducing Rubinius X
by petercooper on Thursday October 17, 2013 @03:36PM
(#6567636)
http://www.rubymotion.com/ is an increasingly big deal for iOS (and now Mac) development.
There are people working on it, see for example: http://sciruby.com/
Re:Introducing Rubinius X
by redwall_hp on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @08:59PM
(#6557383)
>It's still largely used to write web stuff and nothing else.
Vagrant? Homebrew? Jekyll?
Not everyone is working on a startup trying to peddle their stuff to a zillion users and getting hammered in the process. If you ever get to Twitter/Facebook/whatever size no out-of-box solution is going to work. You'll end up doing what Twitter did which is re-architect all their infrastructure/code and tune all their stuff as much has possible.
Ruby's issue IMHO is that it has always been a Rails-centric community/ecosystem and never had the change to grow beyond that. It's still largely used to write web stuff and nothing else. Python, which is a "similar" language, has a much healthier and more diverse ecosystem being used in things like scientific computing or computer vision.
If you want to make Ruby better, grow beyond the web application ecosystem and make it more diverse.