July CVREG Meetup
Sun July 10 2011
Last night was the July CVREG meetup, and the 757rb regulars decided to take a road trip to visit the Legend Brewery, and talk Ruby with our Richmond friends. The theme of the evening was Ruby’s role in doing freelance/contract work. They had a panel of four self-employed Rubyists who answered some questions about working with Ruby as a one-man-shop.
One of the interesting questions that came up was “Is it difficult to ‘sell’ Ruby to clients?” All of the members of the panel had experienced at least one client who was scared off by the fact that they were using Ruby. It goes to show that despite the hard work put in by so many in the Ruby community, and the so blatantly obvious golden beacons that show Ruby does scale (Github, Gowalla, all 37signals products, etc.), a few strategic “RUBY IS SLOW” statements have seriously devastated the public understanding of the language.
Demonstrating that it works, providing benchmarks that smack down PHP, and showing that we can develop applications faster with Ruby don’t matter. The fact that Ruby is “weird” and “slow” make it a non-starter for so many. So what can we do to make Ruby more accepted?