Ruby and the myth of developer productivity [Video]

Selling the productivity benefits of one language over another misses the point

Credit: Potapov Alexander / Shutterstock

Recently I was in a conference room with the CIO of a large corporation and representatives from a vendor that provides a somewhat unrelated product. The corporation’s software is mainly in Java. For some reason, in the middle of the discussion, one of the vendor’s 20-something presales engineers started pitching that the company rewrite all of its software in Ruby.

The reason? It would result in higher developer productivity.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Ruby’s creator sets his sights on mobile. | InfoWorld’s Test Center reviews Ruby in the cloud, as deployed by Engine Yard and Heroku. ]

The proposition that this company would rewrite millions of lines of Java code in Ruby to realize “developer productivity” was absurd. Not surprisingly, the CIO decided he had “another meeting” and excused himself.

This isn’t an isolated presales engineer. Productivity …