Why Hasn't Ruby Won? - Sarah Mei @sarahmei - Ministry of Velocity

- Introduction
  - [work plug]
  - Co-founder of RailsBridge
- Whipping boy of hackernews (*hackernews you cray*)
- Ruby often pokes out too
- Thought process of switching languages (learning from that)
  - often come into the new language w/ baggage from old
  - you speak Ruby with a Java accent
- Programming choices are more Social than Technical
  - Code location, object model, etc. > Gems and Libraries > Frameworks > Languages
  - Evaluation of Gems
    - httparty and faraday ... most people look at the interface when deciding.. but it may not be enough information
    - enumeration
      - read README
      - look at date of last commit
      - look at bug tracker freshness and quantity
      - comments on pull requests
      - blog posts
      - relative popularity (rubytoolbox)
      - date of least release
      <too many to copy, sorry... see the slides>
    - the enumeration changes based on community and individual needs
    - broadly
      - interface (README, use gem, etc)
      - activity (commits, issues, PRs, releases, docs
      - popularity (SO, HN, Google)
      - familiarity (look at code)
    - conversation w/ 4 year old
    - pattern matching on "Why?"
    - artificial neural networks
      - learning parameters, developing a sense of familiarity
      - the idea of 10k hours (talent versus skill)
  - The myth of the 10x programmer
    - if you look at the 10k hours skill as a learning curve, there are some people who go up it faster... others stall
    - like most myths it's partly true... research shows that talent does matter
    - but... there is no research which shows that skill can not make up for no talent
    - vast oversimplifications of a process which deserves deeper understanding
      - not the complete picture
    - comparison w/ gender disparity RE differences in cognitive ability
  - Pair programming
    - interesting experience in other people's decision making process
    - masters poke around and learn actively -- curious
    - novel information in learning
      - people who's imaging included novel information averaged much greater recall than those who were presented with accustomed information
      - mixing new information into your work increases your learning rate
  - Back to gem selection / back to language decision
    - categories and applications to languages (back to ruby decision)
    - interface (gc, threading models, syntax) -- where most people focus on
    - activity (community information, reactions around the language -- personalities involved with the project... how does the leadership respond to criticism)
    - popularity
    - familiarity (at the language level -- how familiar are your assumptions in the new paradigm? e.g. JavaScript has prototypes but Ruby has classes)
      - at the scale of languages, familiarity is about everyone who is working on the project -- not the individual
      - the capabilities of your team are the strongest determiner of what language you choose
- Ruby won't win -- we can't save them
  - not because it's slow or anything
  - language choices are about familiarity.. not everyone will be a match
  - there is losing however...
     - like smalltalk ... a niche language
  - but the learning curve can be accelerated
    - the best thing to do is to go learn something else and then come back
- Speaker will save you an otter pop / Thank you