Ruby advertisement article [Computerwoche]

[Armin Roehrl]

Hi all,

Stefan and I are writing an 10'000 character long article for the
German Computerwoche,
which is a bit like the yellow press of computer magazines, but surprisingly
all IT-strategists (whatever that means) and managers in Germany do read
it every week.

This is a no-code article, only bla bla and economic data, if possible
in man years and in US-Dollars/Euros. I know the qns below mean
nothing about the quality of Ruby, etc. but I think for the acceptance
of Ruby we can gain a majof victory, if we produce the right kind of
business talk.


- Can we estimate how many man years of work have gone into Ruby?
- Can we quote sb. mentionning a concrete project, saying .. doing it
in Ruby was much faster than doing it in Java/C#?
- Any other good ideas?

Thank you,
-Armin

 

[Tom Copeland]

Hi all,

Stefan and I are writing an 10'000 character long article for the
German Computerwoche,
which is a bit like the yellow press of computer magazines, but surprisingly
all IT-strategists (whatever that means) and managers in Germany do read
it every week.

This is a no-code article, only bla bla and economic data, if possible
in man years and in US-Dollars/Euros. I know the qns below mean
nothing about the quality of Ruby, etc. but I think for the acceptance
of Ruby we can gain a majof victory, if we produce the right kind of
business talk.


- Can we estimate how many man years of work have gone into Ruby?
- Can we quote sb. mentionning a concrete project, saying .. doing it
in Ruby was much faster than doing it in Java/C#?

Writing the "Dashboard" utility:

https://ultraforge.ultralog.net/

was certainly much faster and easier in Ruby than in Java. I found the
biggest gains to be:

- Ruby's concise XML parsing capabilities
- prototyping and refining were much simpler than in Java since Ruby is
interpreted

I wrote an article about the Dashboard here:

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/09/10/dashboard.html

which you're certainly welcome to reference, too.

Yours,

Tom

 

[Yukihiro Matsumoto]

Hi,

In message "Ruby advertisement article [Computerwoche]"

|- Can we estimate how many man years of work have gone into Ruby?

How do we measure. I have developed Ruby for 10 years, with help from
other developers all over the world. Currently we have nearly 40 CVS
committers.

matz.

 

[Gavin Sinclair]

Hi,

In message "Ruby advertisement article [Computerwoche]"
on 03/11/27, Armin Roehrl <[email protected]> writes:

|- Can we estimate how many man years of work have gone into Ruby?

How do we measure.

Just like the target audience does: "guestimate".

I have developed Ruby for 10 years, with help from
other developers all over the world. Currently we have nearly 40 CVS
committers.

Sounds like 400 man-years, then, representing - oh, I don't know -
squillions of Euros!

Gavin

 

[Yukihiro Matsumoto]

Hi,

In message "Re: Ruby advertisement article [Computerwoche]"

|> I have developed Ruby for 10 years, with help from
|> other developers all over the world. Currently we have nearly 40 CVS
|> committers.
|
|Sounds like 400 man-years, then, representing - oh, I don't know -
|squillions of Euros!

Remember I worked alone for the first 3 years or so.

matz.

 

[Josef 'Jupp' SCHUGT]

Hi!

* Armin Roehrl; 2003-11-26, 23:48 UTC:

Stefan and I are writing an 10'000 character long article for the
German Computerwoche, which is a bit like the yellow press of
computer magazines, but surprisingly all IT-strategists (whatever
that means) and managers in Germany do read it every week.

'Computerwoche'? Never heard of :-| How does it compare to c't and ix
(that those people *should* be reading)?

- Can we estimate how many man years of work have gone into Ruby?
- Can we quote sb. mentionning a concrete project, saying .. doing
it in Ruby was much faster than doing it in Java/C#?
- Any other good ideas?

Some question to deal with:

- How much manpower is needed to *maintain* software (usually a very
time-consuming task)?

- Costs of introducing Ruby - in terms of training, not of
hard/software. Oops, big trap: Are there any professional Ruby
courses and if they exist: is an in-house option available?

- Can using Ruby mean running into trouble when exporting software to
China or Korea (due to some historical facts concerning Japan and
these countries)? - I don't like asking that question but from a
business point of view it has to be asked :-|

- Is it possible to create distributable binaries that don't require
a Ruby installation?

- Is it possible to obfuscate code so that it is no longer readable
(that question did come up elsewhere when C# was fresh and someone
wrote a tool that created quite readable C# code from CLI
instructions).

- How to deal with the choice between two licenses?

- How portable are Programs written in Ruby?

- How does Ruby compare to Perl and Python in terms of availability
of libraries available books, other documentation and libraries?

- Why switch from a compiled language to an interpreted language?

Just my 0.02 EUR,

Josef 'Jupp' Schugt

 

[Stefan Scholl]

'Computerwoche'? Never heard of :-| How does it compare to c't and ix
(that those people *should* be reading)?

Many german companys buy it and nobody wants to read it. I've seen
it in two very differnt companys.

 

[Tobias Peters]

Hi,

In message "Re: Ruby advertisement article [Computerwoche]"

|> I have developed Ruby for 10 years, with help from
|> other developers all over the world. Currently we have nearly 40 CVS
|> committers.
|
|Sounds like 400 man-years, then, representing - oh, I don't know -
|squillions of Euros!

Remember I worked alone for the first 3 years or so.

Then of course it's 3 + (40 + 1) * 0.5 * (10 - 3) = 146.5 man years.

Tobias

 

[Josef 'Jupp' SCHUGT]

Hi!

* Tobias Peters; 2003-11-28, 14:19 UTC:
[Given that first three years Matz did Ruby development all alone
then with the help of others, presently nearly 40 people. How many
man years of development did go into Ruby?]

Then of course it's 3 + (40 + 1) * 0.5 * (10 - 3) = 146.5 man years.

Let me see if I correctly understand that formula. In the first three
years Matz did work all alone. This gives 3 * 1 = 3 man years.

In the remaining time - this is the factor (10 - 3) the number of
contributors did raise linearly from 1 to 40 which means an average
number of contributors of (40 + 1) / 2.

Let's see what we get if we assume an exponential growth. The number
then grew from 1=0^log7(40) to 40=7^log7(40).

3 + int(0,7,x^{log7 40},dx) = 100 (actually 99.69...)

Besides that theoretical issue there is also a practical one: A
contribution may be tiny or huge. So the effective number of the
present number of contributors may range from 1 + epsilon to 1 + 40.
Without doing actual measurements the numbers computed are just
numbers but do not provide any insight.

Josef 'Jupp' Schugt