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Obie Fernandez blogs about the “What makes Ruby roll” session at JAOO.

One of the questions the panel was asked was “How can Ruby avoid the same fate as Smalltalk?”. My favourite answer has to be from Kevin Henney(I’m assuming the quote is accurate):

Someone will have rewritten it by then. Yes, will succeed where Smalltalk failed because it’s not bound up in the smalltalk environment (you can open up Ruby files in Notepad). Also, do not underestimate how important a ‘normal’ if statement is. The biggest problem with Smalltalk is Smalltalkers.

If I can paraphrase: “The problem with smalltalk is smalltalk and the people who use it”.

Makes me laugh, probably becuase it’s true, but you get arrogant people in all communities, Ruby will probably end up with a few since it’s so popular currently.

Blain Buxton follows up saying: “An image-less Smalltalk would have a nicer entry point…”.

I think this is very true. I seem to remember something called Smallscript that didn’t require an Image, and I’m sure there must be a few more kicking about.

In the end I guess it matters what the Ruby community wants to achieve. Ruby and RoR certainly has a massive mindshare at the moment but who really knows where it’s going to go. Is the goal to become some kind of enterprisey language that corporates feel comfortable deploying? And if so how would the Ruby community even make that happen, I don’t think any amount of endless evangilism about how good Ruby is will do any good, IMO it’s going to take some serious backing by a large technology company before it can start to make those inroads into the Enterprise world. And if it does, then it needs to play nice with Java, C#, and whatever else is being used , it can’t be an island.

If you keep reading Obie’s post there are a couple funny posts which are worth reading for the hell of it.