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Comment by nkassis | Hacker News Reader

I think they are on the right track. Given that this is a 3 year old project, I don't think we can compare it to smalltalk implementation with years of development. I wonder how well it would compare to something like pypy and other similar projects.

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Better question: What happens if companies like google start eyeballing it and putting some real money behind it.

You mean the same Google where Python beat Ruby years ago?

Can't blame them, even a year or two ago Ruby and RoR were much inferior to today. And wait till RoR3 hits the shelves full steam. Granted I hope ActiveRecord3 will include everything by default like DataMapper does but whatever...

Ruby is still in infancy stages, Python is quite old. Hell Python was the inspiration for Ruby.

I mean look at what is happening in the Javascript space. If Ruby and JRuby implementations get really f-ing fast, we will get some major backings. The problem is that instead of improving Ruby, Twitter decided to ditch it. Maybe they really didn't have the people Google has when it comes to language builders. Since google app engine runs python it is in direct google interest to make it fast. Once it starts running ruby, vuala! So don't worry, they'll get to it.

> Granted I hope ActiveRecord3 will include everything by default like DataMapper does but whatever...

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but Rails 3 will still be a full stack framework. Something will be chosen for everything by default.

You'll be able to fully switch out ActiveRecord for DataMapper if you wish.

> Hell Python was the inspiration for Ruby.

I've never seen this before, usually I've heard Matz saying that it's Perl. Maybe a typo?

Matz has cited a number of inspirations, including Perl, Python, Lisp, Smalltalk, Self (I think), and CLU.

He's also referred to Ruby as "Matz Lisp."

> He's also referred to Ruby as "Matz Lisp."

So when does the "enlightenment experience" Eric Raymond promised come ? Or did Matz take it all :-D

appengine runs jruby, that is good enough :)

Python was released in 1991; Ruby was released in 1995. If Ruby is significantly lagging behind Python at this point, it seems unlikely to make up the difference in the future.

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