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RubyGems' Module Count Soon To Surpass CPAN's
mfarver writes "According to the data gathered by modulecounts.com, the total number of modules checked into RubyGems (18,894, and growing at about 27/day) will probably exceed CPAN (18,928, and growing about 8/day) this week."
How many of those modules are solely focused on converting a string to uppercase?
It doesn't matter how many modules there are. It matters how many solid, well-documented modules there are that will continue to get updates and support.
I have no opinion over how much goodness there is in CPAN versus RubyGems; maybe RubyGems is really pulling ahead. But out of nearly nineteen thousand modules, how many really matter? (and how many are just another XML library that's just slightly different and incompatible with the bajillion other XML libraries already out there?)
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Obviously there's some real projects out there using Ruby, is it mainly internal stuff? There's some big contenders for things like PHP (wikipedia probably being the biggest). Does Ruby factor in to any public-facing websites of note? Or is it mainly used in the corporate space in the area where you often find tomcat?
What we use it for at my company is quick prototyping. Especially with Rails. But it's important to note that Ruby is the language and Rails is the framework. These modules could just be a niche field like academia finding it easy to write and share these modules through this site. I'd say that's unlikely given the number and you're most certainly seeing businesses promote some of this. I will say that we actively use hundreds of gems and I'm not sure what the average module:gem ratio would be in these projects -- as far as I can tell, I think it's 1:1 on a lot of the major ones we depend on.
Here's a list of some websites you might know using Ruby. The most notable is Twitter who I think is starting to componentize its pieces and move the high load intensive pieces to Scala. That's not to say they're completely off of Ruby but I think it's a sign that Rails needs a little more maturity before it is going to be seen on a website the size of Facebook. You'll see small to medium efforts excel at Ruby on Rails but the very very giant beasts are still too big for it at the moment. That means that you have a high number of websites using it but the representation is skewed against it since your big sites that everyone use aren't going to trust its maturity yet.
great language. It's simple, elegant, clean and it is versatile. Rails muddies that up a bit but Rails is great for prototyping web applications. In my opinion, the increase in the number of modules shows how versatile the language is and how wildly people want to extend it. It really does have a lot of metaprogramming facets that I've been impressed with and I think that we're going to see a rise of languages like Ruby and Clojure that allow you to do interesting things like write a domain specific language (DST). But will they ever usurp the big old giant languages that command a presence? I guess only time will tell. For web programming, I prefer Ruby to Java when prototyping or writing anything for less than thousands of users. That's where it stands right now but Ruby usage has grown by leaps and bounds and I don't think this module tracking story is a fluke. I think we'll see a steady rise in Ruby modules as people explore its potential. The quality, the performance, the diversity, the revenue can all be questioned but the number of modules is most likely there.
My work here is dung.
Personally I don't care how many modules any repository has, just so long as the ones I want to use work properly. That will always be my primary measure of success, followed closely by how well they are documented and then by how easy they are to find and use.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I sure hope RubyGems isn't the utter DLL hell that CPAN is. The only time I tried shipping a product based on CPAN stuff, I wound up shipping the entire bundle as one, because there's just no way to download it from CPAN and depend on having the exact versions of the modules you developed with available - and when they're not, you're stuck in a messy cycle of upgrade dependencies and API incompatibilities that are almost impossible to resolve.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
The fact that Ruby and Rails make bad programming practices possible doesn't prove anything. The same can be said about any language. I'd rather apply something that has been already said about Lisp. Ruby and Rails are programmer amplifiers, making performance of bad programmers worse, and good programmers even better. Monkey patching can be a very powerful approach, if used properly. It makes possible to write very readable code. It's not so much about changing your code but rather extending it. It can be a very useful technique if used properly.