The argument that Ruby/Rails has a similar entry cost is a close call but has some flaws. Currently, hiring a Senior Ruby developer would be a difficult proposition; the only one I know is starting his own company and is not interested in “taking a step back” by coming back to big enterprise. I imagine this mindset is not exclusive to him; read “Rock Star.”

I would certainly entertain the idea of slipping RoR into the system I am responsible for if it fit the bill but I have to consider the management’s perspective and limit us to the most cost effective and maintainable solution. In this time and place, that happens to be Java/J2EE.

most are reporting much higher success rates than with Java

Thing is that not only success rate is important. But maintainability, changes, support and talent pool are also very important. And BTW for a larger app I would not use Rails as both backend and frontend. The bigger the app, the harder to maintain it - for Ruby.

For less experienced developers, Rails can seem like a godsend — you can develop useful applications without having to build lots of infrastructure nor having to deal with concurrency, database connections, etc. (It’s fair to note CakePHP and Django have similar benefits.)

But for experienced developers, or the noted Rock Star”, Ruby allows for some very elegant solutions with very little code.

Ruby, by itself, would have been hard for enterprise (and other markets) to adopt. But Rails provides support for the learning and flexibility for the knowledgeable. As for the in-between, who but presume capabilities they don’t have, well…you are going to run into problems in any language.

This stigma makes it hard for stakeholders to support developer pleas to use Python (and possibly Django) where they would use Java.

While Ruby has been around for years, it has been considered an esoteric language few knew of. But Rails is new and hot right now. And business stakeholders are hearing about its economic benefits of increased productivity and quicker time to market. In many cases, both developers and stakeholders are interested in Rails and this gives it a favorable position. (I think it is worth noting that a similar phenomenon occurred wit Java in many cases as it gained market share.)

“Super star” developers are like property snobs. Once enough “mainstream” programmers get on the Rails bandwagon (if this ever happens), those “super star” developers will engage in a developer variation of “white flight.”

In ten years, we’ll all be writing nothing but JavaScript. Though the nomenclature will probably change, and we’ll just call it flat-out “script,” because, well, all the other scripting languages will be rotting legacy software.

Zope failed for the same reason Netscape died: they took everything apart and stopped having forward-moving releases. There was Zope 3, and Zope 2, and then they tried to put some 3 features into 2 with Zope 5 (”2+3″, ha) so people would think they were still alive. I was a Python programmer, and I tried to figure out how to write a Zope program, and I couldn’t even figure out what Zope to use. The fact that it was Python was completely incidental to its suckage and demise.
2.

If companies like lower-level languages, why stop at Java? Why not write “enterprise” software in Pascal? If implementing everything by hand is better than abstractions in source code, we can go a lot lower!

People who are just “ok” are likely to make just “ok” and average products, and who wants to buy that? See Seth Godin on this point, he has a lot of excellent things to say about it.

1) You have a very powerful tools: Ruby + rails

2) You have an unknown developer

3) He starts coding in anger (pushing Ruby and Rails to the limit)

4) Nobody understand his code (cause there are no comments)

While in Java, albeit it might take a while, I would argue that you will understand his code one way or another.

What makes you think that Rock-Star developer will write comment? Geeks are known for their code-poetry (or coding as his/her porn). Geeks don’t think documentation is cool.

Besides, Rock-Star developer is the type of person that gets bored easily. There’s a reason why he jumped to different languages quite often. The same attitude will show up in the job. So one day, Rock-Star developer argued that “Hi CIO, Ruby is no longer good enough for our project, let’s switch to LISP today”. Then what happened if he got rejected? He left the company for a better opportunity. He’s a Rock-Star developer right?

Most CIO and managers aren’t that stupid. Most Rock-Star developers aren’t that smart either. They may be super good in coding, and not in everything else.

Most Rails programmers are PHP convert by the way. Most Rails programmers are also Java convert by the way. None of them are LISP convert. So that makes Rails the average PHP and Java community.

So if Rails programmers are in “scarcity”, I’d say, let them be. It’s much better without these mix crowds.

I always wonder why (the average) Ruby and Rails people think that they’re better than Java developer (speaking in terms of average). Most Rails developers can’t push Ruby to its boundary. Most Rails developers can only code as good as their Java/PHP code.

So where we are right now?

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A small pool of Ruby on Rails developers
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Only top 10% can code Ruby correctly without shooting someone else’s foot
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So probably only a tiny useful developers

If I’m a CIO, why would I decided to use Ruby on Rails if most of them aren’t as good as advertised?

I’m not surprised one bit when I found and used broken Rails plugins with no documentation when I was using Rails.