Bruce Tate is the second featured speaker to provided feedback on our erubycon speaker interviews.

Bruce Tate Answers

Bruce Tate is a kayaker, mountain biker, and father of two from Austin, Texas. An international speaker and respected author, Bruce’s primary focus through the years has remained steady: rapid application development of web applications. He specializes on putting highly effective teams on the most productive and most appropriate technologies.

Q: Tell me a little about your background, where you are working and how did you come to start using Ruby?

I have been programming for about 30 years, and programming for money for the last 25. I worked at IBM for a number of years, got bored, and left to work for a startup which immediately blew up. Then, I was an independent consultant, which was a little like saying “Unemployed, but with business cards.” I did Java development, training, mentoring, and consulting for five years or so, and began to think that things were getting too bloated, too complicated, and unsustainable. Dave Thomas challenged me to give Ruby a try, and I did, and loved it, and hated that I loved it. All of my reputation, my books, and my customers were all wrapped up in Java, but I knew it was not the right language for the types of problems I was trying to solve. I interviewed a bunch of people to understand what was happening, and then decided to write a book about the learning experience. That book, Beyond Java, caused a lot of controversy, but the stuff seems pretty tame these days.

Eventually, I shifted my consulting practice to Ruby full time. I later turned a consulting gig into a full time CTO position at http://ChangingThePresent.org, We’re building a charitable contributions portal. At ChaningThePresent, you don’t just make a donation. You get an hour of a cancer researcher’s time, you make a blind person see, and if you like, you can make that tangible donation in the name of another, and get a customized card to announce your donation. We hope to be the de facto resource for nonprofits on the web. We think we’re well on the way.

Q: What unique opportunities do you see for Ruby in the enterprise?

I do everything in Ruby. As computing power gets less expensive, we need to use more of that power, and let the base programming language do more of the work. Our infrastructure is just about all in Ruby these days.

Q: What obstacles do you see to getting Ruby used more in enterprise software?

We don’t see insurmountable obstacles. We do think tools have room to grow, especially in the area of refactoring development environments. The dependence on so many C libraries, like ImageMagic, is a pain for deployment. And we use Rails, which has its share of warts. Caching in the persistence layer is harder than it needs to be. Migrations don’t scale beyond small teams. But none of these things even dent the long term productivity that we experience. Any framework will lead to its share of technical debt. Rails is no exception. All in all, it’s a fantastic framework.

Q: Play oracle for a moment and tell me what you see as the next “Big Thing” in software development.

I always get in trouble for doing this, but I’ll bite. From a language perspective, we seem to be getting closer and closer to a functional language. Ruby is just one step in that direction. We won’t see major movement in the core language for another 10 years, though… we’re locked pretty hard into a 10 year programming language cycle. I think we’ll continue to converge on a set of frameworks that is over HTML and JavaScript. You can easily imagine one of the HAML-like languages putting a dent in HTML, and one of the AJAX frameworks, either in JavaScript or a langauge that composes it, providing a layer over the browser. It’s becoming clearer that HTML isn’t enough, and JavaScript needs layers on top to be everything we need.

Domain specific languages will be unleashed, and driven from things like IDEA’s language workbench and programming languages and concepts in Ruby. This will take us closer to functional programming languages than we’ve ever been.

From a language and feature standpoint, we’ll see continuations play a bigger role. AJAX is complicating web development again, and we’re going to have to make some simplifying assumptions. AJAX tripped up continuation based models for a little while, but I can easily see an abstraction with better encapsulation that lets AJAX play.

So those are three things that I see in the 5-10 year window. In the more immediate timeframe, we’ll see Ruby continue to push Java on the applications end. No single language will dominate, but a bunch of us have already moved beyond Java. There’s still a place for Java, and C++ or COBOL for that matter. But mind share is moving on. It’s inevitable.

Q: What erubycon talk are you most interested in hearing?

It’s an incredible docket. I can’t pick just one.

Thank You

Thank you Bruce. Folks can get more information about erubycon at erubycon.com.