Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmchugh | Hacker News Reader

Ruby is a wonderful language. It would be great if there was some deep-pocketed multinational willing to fund its development in the same way as Facebook has done for PHP or Google has done for Python.

View on HN

Heroku pays Ko1 and Matz [0], and Heroku is owned by Salesforce, which is a public company. Granted, Salesforce doesn't have Google or FB's war chest -- but it's not like Ruby isn't being supported by companies.

[0]: https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/7/12/matz_joins_heroku

Apart from Koichi, there's one more person - Nobu - who is working on CRuby full-time. Nobu's the guy with most commits to CRuby. Matz now does not work on CRuby, only on MRuby and the language specification.

It's also worth noticing that another implementation, JRuby is supported by Redhat. IIRC 2 people work on it full-time: Charles Nutter (Headius) and Thomas Enebo

There's a few of us at Oracle working on an alternative backend via JRuby, as well. Chris Seaton gave a talk on it at RubyConf last week. He has a series of posts about it that are pretty good:

http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/

Obviously, this isn't people being directly paid to work on MRI, but there are side benefits like a richer set of rubyspecs and sometimes fixes landing in MRI.

That was a great talk -- really sort of mind-warping to think that there are people working on "de-optimizing" the JVM so that Ruby can run faster in the average case.

thanks for that, wasn't aware of that connection.

What has Google done for Python? The only story I know of is Unladen Swallow, which was a side project that ultimately failed.

Others will know more, but at very least, they hired Guido for ~7 years and let him spend half of his time working on improving python.

[Same person, lost password for the previous throwaway]

Hiring GvR is better than nothing, but still a very long way from a "deep-pocketed multinational funding Python development".

perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. i apologise. i suppose i'm mainly bitter about PHP. It completely baffles me that FB have invested so much money in the language ecosystem

I wouldn't say Facebook funds the development of PHP per se, but they do fund the development of HHVM and they made the initial draft of the language spec.

Enova Financial in Chicago employs Brian Shirai to work on Rubinius, a new implementation of Ruby.

http://rubini.us/

I could say the same for perl, or anything really.

There's only so much money you can throw at broken language designs and still expect a reasonable return.

I'll bite. What's broken?

Yeah, I'd be interested too. I code PHP, Ruby, Python, C#, js and all of them have quirks and stuff. But Python and Ruby are almost identical other than some syntax sugar. PHP is PHP. $needle, $haystack gets me everytime. JS is just evil. Fucking hate that language. Dog turd. C# is nice, a bit verbose.

I think he's a troll.

He's a smart guy, a Haskell programmer, and co-author of a pretty great Haskell book.

I don't think he's a troll; it just seems that his opinion of Ruby is influenced by experience in other languages.

If he doesn't want to elucidate his point, its basically trolling, no matter what your experience. Its a line designed to draw a rise out of people - that's it.

Are you suggesting that ruby's design is more broken than PHP's?

More that Facebook's return on the amount of money they've spent on PHP is pretty poor.

Facebook has had the author of jemalloc locked up working on making PHP go faster for a few years now. Surely there's a more productive place to sink that kind of talent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com