Now that “From Java To Ruby,” the most recent book from author Bruce Tate, has debuted, one observer thinks it could be read as “From Java To ColdFusion” instead.
Macromedia Director of Architecture Sean Corfield regularly blogs about ColdFusion and other topics at his site, Corfield.org. His latest blog entry concern’s Tate’s latest publication, “From Java To Ruby.”
Citing Gregg Sporar’s review of the book, Corfield sees some parallels in the book where he believes one could easily do a global find-and-replace to substitute ColdFusion for Ruby throughout the text.
Corfield provided a snippet from Sporar’s review, and replaced Ruby with ColdFusion to demonstrate:
“dynamically typed languages like ColdFusion will always be more productive than statically typed languages such as Java. In addition, he is not too fond of Java’s C++ like syntax and the fact that the primitive types are not objects”
“Tate recognizes that ColdFusion could end up being the next Smalltalk, which he describes as not necessarily a bad thing. He thinks it much more likely that ColdFusion will instead be a huge mainstream success. What he did not provide, and what risk-averse development managers could use, is a description of the signs to watch for that indicate that he’s wrong and that ColdFusion is in fact becoming the next Smalltalk”
“We’re used to being a niche language (like Smalltalk),” wrote Corfield. “But what an interesting proposition that we could become a mainstream language.”
One commenter, jaaron, on Corfield’s blog illustrated just how Ruby has gained heightened awareness in the coding world while ColdFusion has remained in that niche:
Arguing against Java or Ruby on the basis of fairness will not win mindshare. Even just presenting technical superiority is not enough. To win minds you have to solve pain points. You have to go above and beyond the solutions presented before. You have to make the benefits so great and the cons so small that the net result is migration to the alternative technology is cheaper than remaining with the mainstream. And even if you do all that, sometimes you still simply need to be in the right place at the right time.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
