Bruce Tate is at it again, pimping Ruby on Rails.
If he was pumping a stock, wouldn't everyone notice that he just bought one million shares of RUBY? He would, after all, stand to make a great living out of being the guy that told everyone in Java-land about Ruby.
Wouldn't we notice that he has absolutely NO real backing of his claims, except that it works great for him and his closest friends, and that the number of RoR downloads has gone from 60K to 260K in, gasp, only 6 months. WTF? I lost interest in the number of Java downloads after it was in the dozens of millions. And that was a number of years ago. I bet DWR alone has more downloads than that.
All statistics points straight up for Java, and claiming that millions of Java programmers will convert to RoR is just rediculous. Or, does he believe it will be converts in the millions from the Microsoft camp? No, it would have to be Java converts. We would jump ship in millions from this extremely well designed, portable, scaleable language with absolutely unprecedented industry support, stunning IDEs, the largest open source base in the history of computing to build upon, because Bruce Tate, the unbearably bad writer of Java books, claims so?
(Sorry, someone had to say this: His pompous canoeing stories in "Bitter Java" drove me nuts.)
BTW, his interest in Erlang is just too funny. Sorry, inside joke.