Pervasive Code

Git is getting a lot of press in the open source world lately, but hasn’t got much traction in the closed source corporate development world. There’s a reason for this, and it’s more than conservatism on the part of the corporate developers. Git (or any DVCS, really) embodies a development culture that isn’t very enterprise-y.
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Last year I was doing mobile development and there was interesting Linux-as-smartphone-OS stuff going on. Now I’m doing Ruby on Rails development and there’s interesting server grid stuff going on. Here’s what I’m looking forward to finding out more about (all of these are things I’ve been watching or directly researching already):
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Coverage tests in Ruby (with rcov) are less strict than in Java (with EMMA), so watch out – 100% coverage is easy to attain but not as meaningful.
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Despite Linus’ strident criticism of Subversion (in the 70 minute video he accuses Subversion, and then anybody who wrote it, and then anybody who likes it, of being ugly and stupid) I still use Subversion and I like it. Clearly compared to Linus I am ugly and stupid. OK fine. But I’m not switching to git now because my tiny teams have been fine with Subversion. Maybe later I’ll give git a whirl.
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A friend who is working primarily in the J2EE technology world (as I was, until early 2006) asked me for a how’s-it-going with respect to Ruby and Rails.

The short version:
- Ruby is fun to program in, as you’ve probably heard
- Rails is over-hyped, but it’s still quite good (definitely not perfect)
- I like the productivity of Ruby on Rails but I wouldn’t call it a silver bullet by any means
- Ruby performance was bad and is getting less bad, and can even be good if you do what the experts say
- The real gem (har har) in the Ruby and Rails space is the community itself
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