Gartner projects that Ruby developers will quadruple, but others question whether it's the only potential successor to Java.SAN
FRANCISCO -- With Java now a very mature language with millions of
developers, the Ruby language is among the fastest growing programming
languages, and the number of Ruby developers is expected to quadruple
over the next five years.
In a panel discussion at the Sun's CommunityOne day preview to
JavaOne here on May 5, Mark Driver, an analyst at Gartner, said, "There
are under one million professional Ruby developers now and we're
projecting there will be four million plus by 2013." Driver later told
eWEEK that Gartner's research shows "strong interest" in Ruby and that
the percentage of developers that will be creating commercial systems
versus those that are hobbyists will be even greater for Ruby than for
other languages. "Ruby will be more interesting to commercial
developers," he said.
The panel discussion featured a variety of participants, including
some core contributors to the JRuby project and a trio of Ruby
developers. In addition, while broaching the issue of Ruby's growth,
the session also at times compared Ruby to other languages such as PHP
and Java itself. JRuby is an implementation of Ruby that runs on the
JVM (Java Virtual Machine).
Charles Nutter, a Sun engineer who is a core committer to JRuby,
said one reason developers are beginning to look at Ruby is that "Ruby
is the flavor of the week, and there are a lot of ways to solve the
problems of the Web."
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