Powerlabs Announces Ruby for Front End

Phil Butler,

on June 21, 2007,

I got a little scoop today from our friends at Powerset Powerlabs. Since the news release of Powerlabs readers have expressed a rather insatiable desire to see something from inside the Powerset development. Today the Powerset blog has announced that their front end is being launched in Ruby - the object oriented programming language. We are very pleased to see Powerlabs follow through on their promise to update us regularly and I have already received 2 or three notifications of exciting news for the coming days. Powerlabs is not launching until September officially but we are wired in as Powerlabbers already and hope to show everyone cutting edge news periodically.

Why Ruby?

The news today is that Powerset has hired some of the finest Ruby programmers available. In fact Ruby is already being used throughout much of Powerset and a substantial amount of their infrastructure is also being written in Ruby and accessed through Ruby services. So, the already prevalent use of Ruby combined with the similarities of Ruby to other object oriented languages obviously adds congruity to the development team's character. Note: Ruby (the language) should not be confused with Ruby on Rails (the framework).

What is Ruby?

Ruby is a reflective, dynamic and object oriented programming language. It is like a combination of several programming languages but essentially a combination of Perl-like syntax combined with Smalltalk-like object oriented aspects. Ruby also shares aspects of Python, Lisp, Dylan and CLU. Ruby is currently used most notably by Twitter and the guys at Powerset have actually had some input and feedback on that service's scalability issues with regard to the diverse language. Ruby is used abundantly in Japan and was developed between 1993 and 1995 by renowned software programmer Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto. Ruby is currently on version 1.8.6 but version 2.0 is on the way, but I am not sure if Powerset is using an advanced version or not. The philosophy behind Ruby language is best summed up in this statement from its creator:

"Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, "By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something." They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves."

Conclusion

Powerlabs is opening up their development and showing us an interesting look inside the once closed door science of creating a fantastic project. The article on the Gluttonous blog, by Kevin Clark one of Powerset's champion programmers, also addresses issues like scalability and I found it fascinating from an east coast perspective that their offices are right down the street from those of Twitter. In fact Twitter had some scalability issues that some of the Powerset people were involved in that turned out to be a non-Ruby issue that out readers may be interested in. I hope my programmer readers will forgive my relative ignorance of coding lingo and the Wikipedia references rather than hands on coding experience. I did promise to update everyone on new developments, but I did not say I would be an expert in every aspect.