Carving a Ruby red road ahead

Ruby is fast becoming the most sought after programming language. How did it all begin?

Neville Roy Singham: If you look at the big picture, between the late 1980s and 90s, the software industry had gone through a 10-year cycle where there was no radical innovation in languages. Nothing happened in the commercial space other than C# and Java. I believe this was a major disaster for the software and IT industry and it was driven by economic reasons and not by technical reasons. The creation of software has been commoditized.

Ruby Central in the Unites States became the world’s home for language innovation. And the Ruby community today is an embracing, open, intellectual community. Then the other partner who actually helped accelerate the change was Sun. Sun’s JRuby reduced the barrier to entry for new language (which is runtime). JRuby allowed the perception that you could actually introduce a Ruby on Rails application without disrupting the existing infrastructure. And so that reduced the chasm and allowed Ruby to become a major player. Apple too has started reducing the amount of Apple script and using more Ruby.

So there was strong ecosystem support around Ruby. And finally Rails was the killer app that Ruby never had. When Rails came along, it took the world by storm and completely took over the Internet space. In addition it brought focus back to usability. Most of the start-ups in the US immediately began switching to Rails. All this put together was the secret key that unlocked corporate IT for the assault of languages.

Where does India stand with regard to Ruby?

Roy: There are interesting geographical differences in adoption of new technologies across the world. Brazil, where ThoughtWorks recently started an office, is entering the software world relatively late as compared to India. It is going straight to Ruby and Python and by-passing Java and .NET.

India will still play a big role because the IT industry here is big and still growing and you now have a younger generation of entrepreneurial, liberated Indian software developers who will be the heart-beat of the smaller companies and will be competing with larger companies.

How effectively does the Ruby community interact among itself?

Roy: Look at the classic example of Github. I’m not even sure if those guys realized what they were building but what they’ve effectively got is the Facebook of Open Source developers. Forget about the Ruby guys – practically every Ruby open-source project is out there anyway. But now the entire Linux code base is on it. We’re seeing massive adoption simply because it’s so ridiculously easy for me to track what other guys have contributed.

In fact, if you look at the trend, the Ruby guys are probably the most vocal, the most interactive group followed by Java. And you can correlate this. Today, if you look at corporate support for Ruby, pretty much every major player is supporting it. Apple has a community supporting MacRuby which is a native implementation of Ruby on the Mac. Sun, and now Oracle, is basically building JRuby on the JVM. Microsoft has IronRuby which is at 0.92, it’s practically ready to ship. Then there are other players.

How can one hope to address challenges (if any) that Open Source faces?

Roy: Open Source is definitely at the cross-roads. There is a challenge for Open Source. I think the business model of Open Source is still difficult. If you look at who contributes inside ThoughtWorks Open Source projects, most of it is because individual programmers at ThoughtWorks use their own personal time to commit to Open Source. I mean it’s not because ThoughtWorks has so much money that it can pay armies.

IBM does because they hire people to do Eclipse. Most people actually get a pay-cheque. So there isn’t a business model for Open Source. And so this is the challenge for us. How do you create hybrid models that still give you revenue? That’s part of the reason why we’ve started the Innovation and Technology Trust. The intention is to support Open Source and emerging technologies that need endorsement and visibility in the IT eco-system in India. If there are other communities out there that need the support and backing, the trust is there for this.