Over the weekend I finished reading the book The Rails Way. I actually enjoyed this book so much that I took the time to read it cover to cover. As good as this book was, it is not specifically the topic of this post. The last chapter of the book contains a series of statements by a bunch of developers who have grown to love Rails. They explain what it is they like about Rails. Each of the statements is interesting, some more so than others. One of the very last statements, written by Nola Stowe, talks about the lack of community across languages and using the right tool for the job. This is what I want to talk about with this post.
Developers who speak extremely highly of a single language while criticizing other languages are being very closed-minded and are shutting themselves off to some great learning opportunities. Once you’ve mastered any given language, and even before you’ve mastered a language, one of the best ways to continue to grow your expertise of that language is to learn and study a new language. You may look at how something is done in a different language and that may inspire you to rethink how you are doing things in the language that you love. The Ruby on Rails framework is a great example of how implementation ideas in one language can influence many other languages. The Rails framework is one of the most innovative web applications to come along in any language. Rails introduced a simple way of building web applications using DSLs, convention over configuration, code generators, and a robust object relational mapping layer. Much of the core architecture of Rails has since been implemented in almost every other language that is used to build web applications. Frameworks in other languages such as Grails, Cake, Django and others all have borrowed ideas from Rails. Also, this borrowing of ideas is not a one way street. Rails was not designed in a vacuum either. While it is true that Rails did alot of new things, it too borrowed ideas from other frameworks and languages.
Consider PHP, this is a language that is routinely criticized as a language that creates some really awful applications that are full of spaghetti code. Is this the fault of the language? Of course not. PHP brought web application development to the masses and I’d venture to say that those developers that create spaghetti code applications with PHP would do no better in a different language. PHP5 actually introduced a pretty good object implemenation to the language and a good developer can write very good applications in PHP, just as a good developer can write good application ins Ruby, Java, or C#. Are there things that a Java developer can learn from PHP? I think so. I believe that each and every new language learned can teach you something.
Too often when you look for language comparisons you come across alot of articles, posts, and other content that praises one language and attacks other languages. If your a Ruby or Railis developer, you’ve probablyl seen the photo of the stack of books that someone put online a couple years ago. The photo shows a large stack of Java books sitting next to a stack of two Ruby and Rails books. The idea behind the photo being that Java is so complicated it requires tens of books to fully understand, while with Ruby and Rails you can get all you need with 2 books. Such a picture wouldn’t fare so well today. I’d venture to say that today Ruby and Rails related books are coming out at an equal or faster pace than Java books. Having alot of books out about a language and its various frameworks and libraries is in my opinion a positive thing. Java has a huge open source following and there are libraries available for Java that do almost everything you want. Having books available about these frameworks and libraries is not a bad thing and does not in and of itself make developing with the language more complex. With the surge in popularity that Rails brought to Ruby, the libraries are gettin better for Ruby but they still can not compare with what Java offers. In a similar vein, more recently there have been a series of videos that promote Ruby while mocking another language. These types of language hype may be entertaining but they are detrimental to the software development community at large in that they usually only breed more distrust and negative feelings across specific language communities. I believe that anything that discourages a young developer from learning a new language is a bad thing.
In the enterprise consulting world, you often hear that comment that such and such company is a Java shop, or a .Net shop, meaning that everything they do is in that language. I think that being characterized as a Java shop or a .Net shop, or a Ruby shop is not something a company should be proud of. For example, Rails has shown tremendous productivity improvements over other languages when developing database-backed web applications. A company that traditionally builds all of their applications in Java or .Net would be foolish to simply ignore this fact because they are a Java shop or a .Net shop. Similarly, Ruby is one of the coolest languages to be using right now. It has a dynamic and rapidly growing community, and the hottest framework on the planet in Rails. However, a project may come along for which there is an existing library implemented in Java which would allow you to complete the project quickly using Java, whereas in Ruby you would have to write this same library. Don’t choose to use Ruby because it is cool or the funnest language to use right now. Use a language because it makes sense for the projects your team is working on. JRuby brings even more interesting twists and scenarios. With JRuby it becomes easy to combine Java and Ruby on the same platform and within the same application. You could use the wonderful Java libraries while writing your new code in Ruby.
Neal Ford speaks of something he calls Polyglot programming. Polyglot programming is the concept of using many different language together even on a single project. The idea is that you should always be focused on using the best tool for the job. Today it is actually rare to write a web application using a single langauge. Your business logic may be written in Java, but consider other languages that you probably use without a second thought, JavaScript, SQL, perhaps a Perl script or too for maintenance tasks. The two primary platforms of today, the Java platform and the .Net platform, are both able to support a growing number of languages. For example the Java platform today supports Java, Ruby, Groovy, Scala and probably a bunch of lesser known languages. Each language may have strengths in a given area. Don’t be afraid to mix and match your languages even on a single project. Use the best tool for the job at hand. We should all be Polyglot programmers. Every good developer should expand their knowledge of languages beyond the one or two that they feel comfortable using. Even if you continue to use a single language, you may find a whole new way of thinking about that language when you’ve studied other languages.
Don’t let positive or negative hype turn you off from learning a programming language that may be outside of your comfort zone. I know that at first glance Ruby can seem very different to Java programmers. It is a dynamic, scripted language and that is a different world to many Java developers. I had been doing Java development for nearly 10 years before I learned Ruby. Now I advocate for Ruby every chance I get. I have not met too many developers who have given Ruby a real trial and have not come away with a positive experience, even if they choose not to use Ruby going forward. So in summary, don’t choose a language simply because thats what your company has always done or because thats the only language you know. I agree that those may in fact be important factors in what is the best choice for your team, but evaluate your optioins and use the right tool for the job.
Last week I attended a conference in Ohio called CodeMash. The theme of this conference is to bring together developers with different programming language backgrounds and have them learn from each other. I think the concept of the conference is wonderful. This is the second year that I’ve attended it and I will continue to do so in the future. We need more community across languages as opposed to just single language user groups and conferences. It would be great to see more user groups of different languages hold combined meetings with topics that are common to multiple languages. I think both groups can learn alot from each other.
Timothy-
