Comments on: Twitter, Ruby on Rails, Scala and people who don’t RTFA

By: Arne Bjarne

Arne Bjarne — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:13:37 +0000

Hey Ruby folks. You should learn a little about the strengths of the other languages. Both Scala and Erlang have light threading and messaging architecture enabling above 10.000 concurrent connections. I think Erlang is stongest there. The functional paradigm enables high concurrency. Scala has the actor/model built in and was designed by the person that developed the first java compiler. It was made to scale.

Ruby can scale well, maybe… but was it created with massive concurrency in mind? Don´t think so.

How can you compete against the JVM with a dynamic language?

Still one can debate all night long if one really needs this performance if one can just add one more box, but then you are missing out on the point.

By: twitter trends api

twitter trends api — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:33:08 +0000

There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points in Features also.

By: Y. Kamesh Rao

Y. Kamesh Rao — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:38:03 +0000

This was a really insightful article. A lot of points noted. Thanks a lot.

By: Timothy

Timothy — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 11:27:37 +0000

Hi Ikai,

After reading many articles on Twitter-Ruby-Scala issue, I summarize the comments as pro Ruby and con Ruby type.

Pro Ruby
——–
Most commenters wrote that Ruby on Rails does scale well and Alex could have done a survey for an open source tool for doing multithreading type operations and integrate it with RoR/Ruby

Con Ruby
——–
Alex as well as any one could have been carried away by RoR capabilities without assuming that Twitter needs more. When situation comes, any project leader would have done the same thing i.e., write essential parts in another language rather than scratch head on the dull capacities of Ruby

Thanks

By: Anthony

Anthony — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:19:36 +0000

“Ruby is probably the most powerful programming language on the planet for creating DSLs, or domain specific languages.” Hah! When you learn more scala you’ll realize that Scala provides a much safer way to create DSLs using implicit, as opposed to Ruby’s open classes. Plus internal and external DSLs are easy in Scala.

By: emil tin

emil tin — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:14:56 +0000

check out macruby – it’s a ruby implemented created by apple on top of the os x objective-c runtime, garbage collector, etc, and based on the 1.9 version. might have interesting implications for long-lived processes?

By: Isaac Gouy

Isaac Gouy — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:55:44 +0000

@Yehuda Katz > The benchmarks are the single-core results for the default combined score on the Alioth shootout

On the benchmarks game we can now see the range of measurements not just a single number.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all&d=data&python=on&php=on&yarv=on&jruby=on&perl=on&python3=on&ruby=on&calc=calculate&box=1

@Yehuda Katz > doing a multiprocess (via fork?)

Just like some of the PHP programs now do?

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all&d=data&python=on&php=on&yarv=on&jruby=on&perl=on&python3=on&ruby=on&calc=calculate&box=1

By: pleax

pleax — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:38:52 +0000

great post! i agreed with you mostly.

maybe except just one thing. scala with its implicit conventions, by-name parameters, higher-order functions is really great for creating dsl’s too.

take a look at specs[1] and apache camel[2].

1: http://code.google.com/p/specs/
2: http://camel.apache.org/

By: 7kittens

7kittens — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 23:29:17 +0000

@ yayoo (above me)

That will not solve anything, it will be simply: who was the better skilled/inspired programer (at the time). Other things that won’t solve anything would be writing the same code (obviously not every language works the same).

> article: “Scala best practices such as programming in an immutable style are far easier to preach than to actual do.”

Hehe… that’s what you should be doing in Java, at least if you take things like the String class as “good example”; and your application is heavily network based (since well, java has come a long way).

By: yayoo

yayoo — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 17:12:42 +0000

my language is better than your language….it’s never ending .

why don’t we have experts in Ruby/Jruby and Scala have a shoot out ? get each side to write the same app and compare them on every metrics aspect ? let them show us what their language can do and the loser will have to shut up once for all about the virtues of his language..

I don’t think it would be that hard to get a sponsor to host the event. think about all the derived advertising that could offset the coss.