I really enjoyed the Mountain West Ruby Conference in Salt Lake City this past Friday & Saturday. There was a great mix of uber geeks, web developers and language enthusiasts all in attendance. My favorite talk, however, was certainly the keynote by Chad Fowler. I don’t think it had a title, but if I could make one up it would be “My Challenge to the Ruby Community: Let’s Win Within”.

Basically, Chad expressed his thoughts and fears about what it means to have “won” in the professional world. Ruby is now a respected language with a “killer app” (Rails), and it’s gaining greater acceptance every day. But that same success, Chad argues, could become its downfall. The culture of our community that has both created and evangelized the Ruby language could become our undoing. For example, if we continue to pretend that Ruby is perfect or flawless, then we might open ourselves up to the kind of hubris that undermines progress. Ruby isn’t flawless—in fact, as the JRuby guys (Charles and Tom) pointed out, the MRI (Matz’s Ruby Interpreter) we’re all fond of can’t scale to multiple processors (it doesn’t have native threading) nor does it support Multilingualization features like Unicode that are standard in any serious web development langauge.

I was excited to see the progress of JRuby, Ruby on .NET, and Rubinius—these three implementations are important in that they not only offer hope for solutions to these problems, but they are actually forming a kind of collaborative network that’s helping to define the Ruby spec and move Ruby in to new territory. JRuby—the most advanced of the three new implementations—is capable of native threading and supports both Rails’ and Java’s solutions to the Unicode problem.

The Ruby community is definitely in flux right now, and along with Chad I hope that we can build a stronger identity by rising to the challenge within ourselves. Ruby can be so much better! Let’s put the temptation to hype Ruby aside and get to work again.