Thoughts on SmallTalk

Jeff Sutherland is one of the few original signatories of the agile manifesto who has enough integrity to allow agile methods to grow beyond its founding members. In this blog he points out the benefits of Ruby running on the Java VM. He later suggests that SmallTalk should also consider the same approach. I wonder if him and James Robertson have ever talked?

I am of the opinion that there should be a separate JRuby initiative and that the Ruby community at large should drop their current approach and embrace the JRuby stuff. Of course the issue of compatibility will arise such as use of forks but it is better to deal with this earlier rather than later.

By the Ruby community acknowledging the greatness of Java, they could gain the following capabilities for Ruby:

• Kick butt concurrency


• Better deployment tools


• A lot better documentation


• A more secure platform


• Access to a larger community


• Type safety

This week having attended a wonderful course taught by secure coding guru Kenneth Van Wyk, I suspect that the next step for the Ruby community is to get companies such as Fortify Software, Ounce Labs and others to produce tools that will allow Ruby applications to be built in a more secure fashion.

Likewise, there is another opportunity for the Ruby community to embrace Java. Imagine the ability of Ruby applications to run on 384 CPUs. I suspect that if they can get Ruby certified it may remove the ability of enterprisey folks to have an opinion that Ruby doesn't scale. I suspect James Robertson and his product offering could equally benefit from such scalability...