A little after I wrote up the news yesterday that salesforce.com was acquiring Heroku I came across a quote from Marc Benioff, tweeted by @timanderson
“Ruby is the language of the cloud 2″
Computerweekly has a fuller version:
“Ruby is the language of Cloud 2 [applications for real-time mobile and social platforms]. Developers love Ruby. it’s a huge advancement,” said Benioff. “It offers rapid development, productive programming, mobile and social apps and massive scale. We could move the whole industry to Ruby on Rails.”
Apart from conflating Ruby on Rails the development framework with Ruby the programming language, something which many Ruby developers hate, but which its easy to slip into (so easy i slipped into it yesterday) Benioff was clearly not talking the language of the line of business, but rather of technology.
It seems to me we’re witnessing a sea-change at the moment. Many of the commentariat, industry analysts and so on, still seem to think the purchaser is king – that IT will simply be bypassed by savvy business users. But what about developers? We are currently emerging, blinking, from a dark period when many enterprises, and their advisors, truly believed we could just draw up a business process diagram and ship it offshore for coding by commodity developers. There was a Taylorist view of software development, an artefact of Waterfall development. But the model was broken. Innovation comes from code, and code comes from software developers. Coding is social. The idea developers are a commodity is as broken as the notion that a free market consists of independent actors making independent decisions that always lead to better outcomes. We are people, we are herds, we might as well be wildebeests. Well Benioff wants to be the alpha male, showing the way to the next watering hole. He isn’t alone.
I wrote a couple of months ago about a bravura performance from VMWare CEO Paul Maritz. He said:
“Developers are moving to Django and Rails…
[…] the DreamForce conference last month, SalesForce’s CEO, Mark Benioff, called Ruby the “Language of the Cloud.” On the show floor, I had dozens of conversations with Java developers about Ruby, and Ruby […]