I have found James McGovern's post More Thoughts on Ruby and Why it isn't enterprise ready! to be quite entertaining reading. The problem with blogging is that sometimes it is so easy to publish your thoughts that you don't stop to think about what you are writing. Instead of picking at James McGovern's arguments myself, I'll post a summary of his tirade made by David Heinemeier Hansson in his post Boy, is James McGovern enterprise or what!

Allow me to summarize a few choice bits from McGovern's incomprehensibly convoluted ranting. You may not have the patience to finish through his tirade:

• Productivity doesn't matter any more (8), but even if it did, there's no way Ruby could deliver more of it because sales people have used the word productivity to lie to me in the past (11).
• Whatever we're doing now is already the right thing (2) until the big consulting firms tell us that something else is the right thing (3). And they're not going to tell us about Ruby because they can't make money off it (7).
• None of my fellow Enterprise Architects talk about Ruby (5) because they're too busy to think about their business to worry about new technology (4).
• All magazines that write about Ruby are bad (4) and all books written about Ruby are bad (1). If other people say they're good, it's because they were paid to say that (12).

The funny thing about a lot of the people who claim to be 'Enterprise Architects' is that I've come to realize that they tend to seek complex solutions to relatively simple problems. How else do you explain the fact that web sites that serve millions of people a day and do billions of dollars in business a year like Amazon and Yahoo are using scripting languages like PHP and approaches based on REST to solve the problem of building distributed applications while you see these 'enterprise architect' telling us that you need complex WS-* technologies and expensive toolkits to build distributed applications for your business which has less issues to deal with than the Amazons and Yahoos of this world?

I was chatting with Dion Hinchcliffe at the Microsoft SPARK workshop this weekend and I asked him who the audience was for his blog on Web 2.0. He mentioned that he gets thousands of readers who are enterprise developers working for government agencies and businesses who see all the success that Web companies are having with simple technologies like RSS and RESTful web services while they have difficulty implementing SOAs in their enterprises for a smaller audience than these web sites. The lesson here is that all this complexity being pushed by so-called enterprise architects, software vendors and big 5 consulting companies is bullshit. If you are building distributed applications for your business, you really need to ask yourself what is so complex about the problems that you have to solve that makes it require more complex solutions than those that are working on a global scale on the World Wide Web today.

NOTE: This post isn't pro-Ruby or not since I have NOT used the language or any of its platforms.