Ruby off the Rails

[celldee]

I did a quick search on jobserve.com for 'ruby'. I got 60 hits, most
of which were unsurprisingly asking for RoR developers. I did another
search for 'perl' and got 958 hits. While I am very pleased that RoR
is being more widely adopted, it would seem that there is little or no
demand for Ruby developers outside of rails.

Are there a growing number of non-Rails Ruby jobs that I'm not
spotting? Or are there really very few organisations that are willing
to adopt Ruby as a general purpose scripting language?

 

[Douglas F Shearer]

Hi there.

I did a quick search on jobserve.com for 'ruby'. I got 60 hits, most
of which were unsurprisingly asking for RoR developers. I did another
search for 'perl' and got 958 hits. While I am very pleased that RoR
is being more widely adopted, it would seem that there is little or no
demand for Ruby developers outside of rails.

Are there a growing number of non-Rails Ruby jobs that I'm not
spotting? Or are there really very few organisations that are willing
to adopt Ruby as a general purpose scripting language?

From my searches on Jobserve over the last few months, it would seem
there is little demand for Ruby developers outside of Rails. It
certainly seems the case that demand for ruby skills is driven by
Rails, rather than the language being adopted in it's own right.

There has however been some increase in the number of RoR jobs, some
of which are even making it north of the border (I'm in Edinburgh,
Scotland). I've even had potential clients call me in the last few
weeks to ask about Rails for doing work they previously did with Java
or PHP.

Interesting times.

Douglas F Shearer
(e-mail address removed)
http://douglasfshearer.com

 

[brad]

Are there a growing number of non-Rails Ruby jobs that I'm not
spotting? Or are there really very few organisations that are willing
to adopt Ruby as a general purpose scripting language?

Just my observations. I don't encounter it as an official
corporate/institutional language, however, I do see it a lot at the
sys-admin/java developer levels... bottom to top if you will. It's more
of an un-official language used by local developers who are on average
more inquisitive than most. I see Python usage like this too, however,
it seems to be moving more to an 'official' position in companies. Perl
is still strongly entrenched. Many Solaris Admins won't allow any other
interpreted language besides Perl and really prefer sh scripts as many
Perl scripts have rely on non-standard modules that aren't (and won't
be) installed for security reasons.

Just my 2 cents

 

[Mohit Sindhwani]

Just my observations. I don't encounter it as an official
corporate/institutional language, however, I do see it a lot at the
sys-admin/java developer levels... bottom to top if you will. It's
more of an un-official language used by local developers who are on
average more inquisitive than most. I see Python usage like this too,
however, it seems to be moving more to an 'official' position in
companies. Perl is still strongly entrenched. Many Solaris Admins
won't allow any other interpreted language besides Perl and really
prefer sh scripts as many Perl scripts have rely on non-standard
modules that aren't (and won't be) installed for security reasons.

Just my 2 cents

At my company, we use Ruby for a lot of general scripting (and this is
on Windows) for things like downloading files, pre-processing data,
generating statistics and graphs, monitoring link status, sending out
emails when things fail, converting data between different data formats,
move data between programs, hold different programs together, and oh
yes, for Rails.

My only complaint with Ruby tends to be that on Windows, it takes a bit
of time before the script loads. But that said, the development time
with Ruby is fantastic and lets us achieve things very very fast!

However, now that you bring it up, at least for our tasks, we find that
scripting in Ruby just doesn't require a full-time hand. Yes, when
we're doing some Rails work, it takes a few days to get a medium sized
app done, but for most general Ruby scripts, the development time is in
hours. Admittedly, we do a lot of development in C, C++ and Java for
our regular stuff.

It is likely that a lot of people are just using it on the side to get
things done quickly and then on to something else?

Cheers,
Mohit.
8/21/2007 | 11:27 PM.

 

[Robert Klemme]

My only complaint with Ruby tends to be that on Windows, it takes a bit
of time before the script loads. But that said, the development time
with Ruby is fantastic and lets us achieve things very very fast!

Did you consider that this might be due to the AV engine your shop uses?

It is likely that a lot of people are just using it on the side to get
things done quickly and then on to something else?

I guess I fall into that category: my main work is Java and databases
but I use Ruby frequently for things like evaluating log files,
generating statistics from them etc.

Kind regards

robert

 

[Robert Klemme]

Are there a growing number of non-Rails Ruby jobs that I'm not
spotting? Or are there really very few organisations that are willing
to adopt Ruby as a general purpose scripting language?

Maybe productivity with Ruby is so high that only few developer
resources are needed (see Mohit's posting). That's bad for Ruby jobs
but would be an incredible selling point for the language...

Kind regards

robert

 

[Mohit Sindhwani]

Did you consider that this might be due to the AV engine your shop uses?


I guess I fall into that category: my main work is Java and databases
but I use Ruby frequently for things like evaluating log files,
generating statistics from them etc.

Kind regards

robert

Hi Robert,

The point regarding the AV is interesting. We're using Symantec Norton
AV. I've never looked at it closely because I started with Rails and
everyone on Rails-talk was complaining that Rails took ages on Windows.
So, I assumed that it was normal that a script took 4 - 6 seconds to
start. Any pointers what I may be looking for here?

Thanks again!

Cheers,
Mohit.
8/22/2007 | 12:34 AM.

 

[Robert Klemme]

The point regarding the AV is interesting. We're using Symantec Norton
AV. I've never looked at it closely because I started with Rails and
everyone on Rails-talk was complaining that Rails took ages on Windows.
So, I assumed that it was normal that a script took 4 - 6 seconds to
start. Any pointers what I may be looking for here?

If you can switch off the AV engine and see whether your scripts come up
faster. As a minimum you might be able to exclude your Ruby directories
from scanning. It all depends on your admins.

Kind regards

robert

 

[Mohit Sindhwani]

If you can switch off the AV engine and see whether your scripts come
up faster. As a minimum you might be able to exclude your Ruby
directories from scanning. It all depends on your admins.

Kind regards

robert

Thanks Robert

I'll look into this tomorrow - it is an interesting thing to check out
anyway. On the other hand, the things we are working with do not get
affected if a script takes a few seconds to start up!

Cheers,
Mohit.
8/22/2007 | 12:42 AM.

 

[Kyle Schmitt]

My 2 cents.
I'm under the impression that the reason that many AVs will slow down
ruby is because they check all file open operations, to make sure they
are kosher. This won't just slow down ruby, but any other scripting
language that involves many many files, and even compiled languages
that require many files. There are stories floating around of people
having to do major restructuring work on applications because they
ended up crawling when AV is on.

--Kyle

 

[Lloyd Linklater]

I did a quick search on jobserve.com for 'ruby'. I got 60 hits, most
of which were unsurprisingly asking for RoR developers. I did another
search for 'perl' and got 958 hits. While I am very pleased that RoR
is being more widely adopted, it would seem that there is little or no
demand for Ruby developers outside of rails.

Are there a growing number of non-Rails Ruby jobs that I'm not
spotting? Or are there really very few organisations that are willing
to adopt Ruby as a general purpose scripting language?

Well, there are other things to consider. Even though the number of PHP
to ruby jobs is about 15:1 in this case, that is not really the end of
the story. If there are more than 15 PHP programmers to every ruby one,
then there are actually MORE jobs. Also, ruby is not yet in the
mainstream but it muddling its way there. Such things take time to
start but can snowball quickly, as happened with Java. Managers decide
which language to use and who to hire. They are typically ignorant of
such things and need to have things waved in their face before they feel
enough backbone forming that they can tell the big boys in the meetings
that they want to use ruby.

On the plus side, when the snowball does start, those that have been
doing it in the pre-dawn times will have a major head start.