Not to beat a dead horse, but I wanted to add a few comments about the series of posts James McGovern blogged on why large Enterprises don't care about Ruby. The values and accuracies of these posts has already been sufficiently challenged and discussed by many.
The interesting thing is that the conclusion of the last post, does not really show any reason that Ruby should not to be in the enterprise other than for political reasons. He asks people to prove that Ruby is used in the enterprise with the following 3 criteria:
1. Please provide the URL to any publicly available case study on Ruby where it is being used by a Fortune 200 enterprise where it is the primary development language for an enterprise application (using any definition I have mentioned in the past within my blog, sorry you can't make up your own) that is currently in production.
2. Please provide the name of any full-time employee (not consultant) of any Fortune 100 enterprise that will be speaking at any conference (or user groups where attendance is over 500) that will focus on their usage of Ruby. Also include the URL to the conference brochure.
3. A copy of any major IT publication (e.g. Infoworld, eWeek, etc) that has circulation over 50,000 copies where a single IT executive of a Fortune 200 enterprise will be on the front cover and within the article, they mention they are displacing other languages in favor of Ruby.
Other than these being a bit silly and perhaps self serving, it is interesting that these criteria would never show a grassroots adoption of any technology for several years and it should be pretty clear that simple technologies (like Ruby) grow in any large enterprise through a grassroots effort.
Besides how many IT executives really want to know or talk about how the simple technologies are used in their enterprise. They have their plate full of complex things already going on.
I think Ruby will likely become pervasive in enterprises in sufficient time, because it is a good choice. However, it will take a bit of time for it to actually have the kind of visibility McGovern talks about. I have seen people who are choosing Ruby in a large enterprise for economical reasons, but keep it under the radar because they are in a ecosystem driven by politics.
On another topic. James McGovern defends James Gosling's comments about Ruby. I think Goslings comments are a bit flippant and driven from two forces. The first is ignorance that sometimes occurs after attaining a position where you receive less crtiticism/feedback or develop an ego from your success that you no longer listen to that feedback. The other force is driven by Sun's tendency towards marketing. In truth, both of these forces sadly work negatively against any assessment that Gosling makes on any non Java technology.
Regardless of McGovern's intent, I expect his blog will drive Ruby into the enterprise faster. Mostly because he states a poor argument for it not to be there. The bigger question is: Will this be healthy for RoR at this point in its life or are the wheels already moving too quick?
