Losing Faith

Lately, I've been going through a lot of frustrations with Ruby (by ruby I don't meant just the language but the whole ecosystem and infrastructure based on Ruby). I am in a finishing phase on several projects. It's a time when the finer details get addressed. When there's no more time to do it later, differently or drop it all together. It's when everything that is supposed to work should actually work. The problem with Ruby is that it's been in this kind of finishing phase pretty much ever since I started using it (2004). If you look at it from far enough it seems like there is everything in it but when you come closer and actually try using it you'll find out that a lot of it is in less then pre-alpha stage (of course labeled as production). No language is an island unto itself. No matter how great the language you probably don't want to create all the basic libraries from scratch.

When I made a switch in 2004 Ruby was fairly new, Rails was fairly new so I expected this kind of problem, but you could feel the change in the air. Pretty much all the industry heavy weights were talking about it - Rails conf had a better key note line up than any other conference around, number of books was written and the whole Ruby ecosystem was created over almost overnight. Sad truth is that many of the heavy weights are still talking about it today but they're yet to do their first project in Ruby / Rails. Despite the explosion like surge in popularity little has changed in terms of actually usable Ruby libraries (actually I have the same feeling about 1.9 as well). This is a stark contrast to some of the uncelebrated languages out there. For example I find myself writing increasingly more and more code in Python. I don't think Python is the next Ruby, but I was quite surprised how easily it addressed things I struggled with for 5 years in Ruby.

An example could be excel libraries. I still use the same excel libraries I did 5 years ago (for export I switched recently to xlwt, for import because of the changes in roo I've been using JXL for years now switching to xlrd). The export is great only it doesn't support much formatting and breaks on spreadsheets over 10MB (actually somewhere over 6MB) and the files sometimes don't work on later versions of MS Office. There's been a rewrite that is able to go over 10MB but still without formatting I would need and with a license that doesn't allow commercial use. Python's xlwt - despite a very crude and unpolished appearance is able to produce a complete excel spreadsheet with all the formatting (numbers, dates) (including page setup) and all that in much shorter time and with less resources (Ruby 1.8 4m 28s, Ruby 1.9 2m 36s and Python 33s). I have quite a few more examples but I really don't mean this as a Ruby - Python comparison. This experience, however, got me thinking if Ruby is right for the job I've been trying to do (ie uncool enterprise systems). There are pretty much 2 things for me in Ruby (okay - 2.5 the 0.5 being RubyMine - I'll write about it in some other post). One of them is expressiveness of the language and the other is Rails. Ruby as a medium is incredibly expressive, reads almost like English and allows to do pretty much anything (iterating/mapping an array in 1 line, etc). The down side - as Robert C. Martin put it - is that it's really easy to make a mess. After several months of going through somebody's else code I couldn't agree more. A nice entanglement of block and yields and procs can challenge most of the PHP spagetti code any day. While this expressiveness is incredibly powerful, many times I opt for more verbose solution - Java programmer's code on Monday morning as Gregg Pollack would say - that I will be able to understand 2 years down the road - or that my junior developer will understand.

The other thing in Ruby for me is Rails. The only thing with Rails is that after the years it's becoming a bit too entangled, while it made a lot of sense initially to bundle everything together (ORM, routing, templating, etc.) initially now it starting to be a reason why Rails slowly falls behind in certain areas (either that or Rails team has simply decided to focus on Web 2.0 start up market and let others handle enterprise problems). As surprising as it may seems the world around has not been snoozing after Rails was created and many people took the best ideas (just like Rails did from J2EE world) replaced what didn't work and the whole industry moved forward. While few years back Ruby and Rails were pretty much necessities now there's a lot of alternatives and in many different language. To channel out my current frustrations I started experimenting with quite a number of frameworks and platforms. After so many years I really know what I want and how it fits with my existing projects and infrastructure. Very briefly -

• I am looking for a modular framework where I can choose different ORM, different templating engine and so on where each component is developed independently by people who understand that specific area. As each of my project is very different sometimes I need the flexibility to change components. It was a great thing back in my Java times (Spring + Hibernate + Webwork). 
• I really need an enterprise friendly dynamic language. Life's just too short to be wasting time trying to force a language to do things it's inventors don't consider important. 
• I need a basic ecosystem of libraries (from XML, JSON, through excel, PDF, OO to image manipulation). 
• I need a framework that supports TDD out of the box. 
• I need a platform with (at least some) formal education and certification available. I need it because I employ people and certification really helped me back in Java times. To pass even the first Java certificate required people to study and to really understand the language and they simply took it as an independent measure of their skills. 
• I need a language with a proper IDE. I use Vim every day - BUT not for programming. I've been using RubyMine for more than a month now and I feel like a blind man that got his eye sight back.
• I need reasonable deployment option - both scalable and resource efficient. 
• Increasingly more important - I don't want the language/platform community to offend others

It's almost uncanny how many items point back to Java :-). Actually, it's kind of sad that things I took for granted 5 years ago in Java are still not available in the most celebrated and most wildly endorsed language of today. If you look at it - nothing really substantial changed in the way we do the backend (MC) part of the systems. A lot has changed on the View side, but the models and controllers use the same principles as years back. I've used Python/Pylons quite a lot lately and it scores quite high on a number of areas (only so-so on the IDE, though). It seems much more mature compared to Ruby with more matured libraries supporting the enterprisey stuff (so ostracized in Rails community). On the other hand it's marketing is nowhere near Ruby's - you don't really hear people talking about wishing to work in Python. I am a bit worried about the performance - but that's something I just have to try on a real project. A big issue still remains the education and certification. I went through this with Ruby already - no matter how easy and great and superior the language you still need to spend some time learning and then even more time working in it before you really understand it. While there's quite a number of books on Python not much of training courses (at least not in Singapore) and there doesn't seem to be any certification around.