Agile Languages

The other day I was having lunch with a friend - a good programmer - and I asked him what he was working on. He said that was learning about Ruby, and Rails, and Rake. He talked about how he thought it would be nice to use Rake at this one client to clean up their messy build. I asked him how Rake differed from Ant, and he replied "Well, I haven't actually used Rake yet, but it looks really cool." And suddenly I felt uncomfortable.

Once upon a time, Java was new and fresh and exciting. To those of us coming from a C++ background - and who had never heard of Smalltalk - Java seemed to us like C++ done better: familiar syntax, but with garbage collection and a beautiful set of standard libraries, all packaged on top of a platform-independent runtime. Java and its associated collection of frameworks have matured to the point where you can crank out a web-based database front-end and have a pretty good idea of how long it will take, and where you'll run into problems. But because we're geeks, we prefer to tinker with new things, and a corollary of this is that we don't like to tinker with old things that we know very well, even if they're working OK. Enter Ruby.

There's a lot of momentum right now behind Ruby, especially Rails, and some of this momentum is coming from within the Agile community. To a certain extent, this makes sense - agile teams strive to deliver high-quality software in an iterative fashion with just-in-time requirements. The tools we use can help us or hinder us in this effort. And of all our tools, the most important is our programming language. It is through language that we are able to express processes and abstractions in such a way that we can automate and manipulate and understand them.

Some say that the choice of language is irrelevant, that all languages are effectively the same. But anyone who says this is either unaware of the differences between languages, or - more likely - is simply being polite, avoiding an argument. Would anyone seriously argue that assembly language is as expressive as Java? But what about the difference between Java and C#? Here the answer - if there is one - becomes more complicated, and so most of us just punt. However, if we're all excited about a new language (such as Ruby), and if we're going to be responsible with our employers' money, then we need to address two issues:

1. Are we switching to Ruby because it's really that much more productive, or are we switching to Ruby because we're geeks and we're bored and we've done it in Java and now we're just dying to try something new...?
2. If there are valid reasons to toss Java and try something truly new, should that something new be Ruby? Are we all excited about Ruby because it's really the right way to go, or is it because we're being told us to be excited about it?
   

When a community springs up around a new technology and reaches a critical mass, a training and consulting community springs up around it as well, because everyone smells the money. And therein lies the danger that we might make decisions for the wrong reasons: because there are now a lot of people telling us how great Ruby is who have a financial stake in whether or not we like Ruby.

I understand that Rails is a wonderful framework with which to write a web app. I also understand that there are similarly wonderful frameworks written in other languages - Django, web.py and others for Python, Seaside for Smalltalk, and so on. So why are we excited about Ruby and not about, say, Python?

I've never been paid to write an application in Ruby, or Python, or any of these other fancy dynamic languages, so I'm ill-qualified to pass judgment on any. But as an outsider, what concerns me is this: in the Java community, we didn't break a bunch of new ground. To be brutally honest, we - or, at least, I - ain't the best and the brightest. If we were, we'd be doing something more interesting than using Blub to write the nine-billionth web-based database front-end for a bank.

But here's a question: if Ruby and Rails are so great, then why is it that Google and YouTube and many of the more interesting startups gravitating instead towards Python? If I were an IT manager, this would make me curious.

There are a lot of interesting languages with active communities happening at the moment. Ruby, Python, Haskell, Erlang and Common Lisp seem to be the standouts. The hardware people tell us that foreseeable future performance gains are coming through multi-core parallelism; that instruction-level parallelism has gone about as far as it can go.

This is a very, very important fact for software developers, because it means that we will no longer be getting the speed-ups for free from the compiler and the hardware - it means that we will have to program parallelism. History shows that the software community in general isn't very good at this. In fact, we suck. Erlang, however, provides a beautiful model for executing several concurrent processes and keeping them coordinated. So if we're looking towards the future, shouldn't we be more interested in Erlang, or something like it?

Most of us are corporate IT programmers, which means that every day we spend a whole lot of someone else's money. Don't we owe it to our customers to pick our technology based on something more than a fad?