JRuby pod-cast

I almost accidentally got to hear Neal Ford's interview about JRuby this morning.

Love it or hate it, Ruby cannot be ignored. Yet the articles and blog-posts you find on Ruby vs. Java are many times so emotional and single-minded that it became a really good joke. But not this one.

Neal starts with a bit of history, goes through Ruby comparison to Java (expressive power, meta-programming capabilities), the rising importance of JVM as a multi-language platform, comparison between JRuby and other JVM languages (Groovy, Jython, Jaskell, Scala) when to use them and how to get JRuby into your corporate development environment (the tips include - "don't say the word Ruby as long as it runs on the JVM" and "use it in test or build environment first - Ruby has great advantages there and it's easier to justify a new tool for build or test than for production") and finally about his work on first commercial product developed entirely in JRuby - the agile team management suite called Mingle.

I also liked his general comments regarding how G0F design patterns illustrate language deficiencies, his objection to XML programming and why the concept of protective programming environment allowing to scale software development through hiring zillions of bad programmers is bankrupt.

P.S. Martin Fowler, Neal's colleague at ThoughtWorks, recently blogged about JRuby too.